“You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
— C.S. Lewis to Walter Hooper, as told by Hooper in a lecture at Oxford University
I just finished reading another good book borrowed from our own Geneva Public Library, an establishment that stands taller in my mind as a citadel of emotional security every day. The older I get, the more I love to read, and the more our world goes psychologically and emotionally spastic, the taller our library building seems to stand and the thicker its walls seem to grow. All of which is good, because the more spasmodic the world gets, the more I read and the more grateful I am for our library and the knowledgeable and amiable folks who work there.
It’s a kind of literary sanity cycle, I suppose: Insanity-Library-Read-Sanity. Repeat.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports that there have been over 400 significant anti-government protests worldwide in more than 132 countries since 2017, 23% of them having lasted for more than 3 months [carnegieendowment.org/]. Whatever such disturbing numbers translate into, it can’t be good. Such realities do not bode........