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What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud. ↗
A strong man does not succumb to pressures, he knows that without pressures he will not find pleasures and so he will not be made. ↗
Yes, a great library — a library as magnificent as this one — was a dangerous arsenal, one that kings and emperors feared more than the greatest army or magazine. Not a single volume from the Spanish Rooms would survive, he swore, sniffling into his cup. No, no, not a single scrap would escape this holocaust! ↗
But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. ↗
Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗
A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there. ↗
More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. ↗
