ONCE UPON a time, men and women found solace in books. Be it a rainy day, a bad day or even just an idle day, crawling between those lines took us away from our world. It didn’t matter if our problems were as small as misplacing a set of keys or burning our morning toast or big problems like failing things and sunken ships, there was that one book that would take us in and introduce us to fictional problems, a world that promised closure in the end, people who had motives for doing what they did and events that happened for a reason.

 

They let you be the master of a situation, gave you the higher understanding, the chance to make up your mind and harmlessly delivered the ending. For that brief period you are lost among those pages, you don’t have a mounting debt, the baggage of being yourself, it didn’t matter how smart you were or what your race, colour, or religion is. Nothing but the pressing problems of those men and women whose lives have been laid out for us mattered.

 

We visited libraries and bookstores to borrow and purchase companions that could fit in our bags and travel with us. We carried great men and women who shared their wisdom with us. They spoke for us. They laid their hearts and lives out for our pleasure. They made up characters and told stories for our entertainment.

 

It is being said that with the arrival of computers and the Internet, books are being replaced. People no longer physically go to the libraries or a bookstore. Can browsing and clicking ever really give you the feeling that standing in a quiet corner of a bookstore and staring at an entire shelf of book and bursting with the greed to buy them all will give? Will scrolling down ever be the same as turning the page and feeling the roughness of the paper or hearing the turning the page make music that could only be compared to the sound that a wave makes against the sand? Highlighting text could never live up to marking your favourite lines in a book and coming back to it years later wondering how you felt at that moment marking those lines or how different you were when you did it.

 

It is such a melancholy that the children go through these pleasures lesser and lesser every day. As Lyon Phelps once wrote, there is nothing like living breathing men and women for friends but books make the best of certain men accessible to you whenever you want. Reading should not become a dying culture. It shouldn’t be a phase that the human kind went through that technology ended. It should be a flourishing habit that can give mind a place to learn, understand, live, love, laugh, cry and if needed, to find solace.