Books

Billy Collins is a personal favourite of mine. He was Poet Laureate for the US during, I believe, the early 2000's. One of the poems I love of his is the one titled Books. In this poem he tells of a library "humming" late at night and each book "together forming a low, gigantic chord of language."

Collins develops different scenarios - childhood reading, college reading, etc. But towards the end, the final stanza, he writes:

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

He does keep going, but these are the lines that interest me most. Do we read ourselves away from ourselves in search of more light? Is this a form of escapism? Is escapism a bad thing? I do think we read ourselves (the universal man) in literature and yet are able to lose ourselves in the piece, immersing ourselves in it until we lose ourselves. I also think we read in light because it is nigh impossible to read in darkness, but I also think we read to find light. That light can be an analogy for hope or some other virtue, but it is nevertheless true. We are searching for some sense of light. Thus being able to see truth. The truth that is found in our escapism of happily ended fables or the truth of violent tragedies of fiction or fact. Either way we find truth, by escaping into a book. And that is what keeps us going, that is the trail of crumbs we follow across and on to the next page.