I have spent more than my share of hours wandering among stacks of books. For there a multitude of worlds collides - not just between the layers of those delicious paper sandwiches, but within ourselves as we hold them and open them and turn their leaves in wonder. A brilliant mentor of mine taught me something that still astonishes me, every time I stop to consider it. Every book, every work of literature, she said, has a voice.

As we read, we hear that voice speak within our inner spaces, and - wonder of wonders! - our own voice answers, and a dialogue begins. In this way, books become friends. In this way, our innocent imagination becomes peopled with strangers eager to impress upon us their version of the universe. So it is that a book presents a portal to the unexplored in the world we see "outside" us, and to fresh and fertile regions within our own mysterious selves. That meeting place, in which we enter a fantastic dialogue with the written word, with the voice of one whom we have quite possibly never met, shows us in very specific ways how fine and good it is to be amazed.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

--Thoreau