I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for a… - Elias Canetti

His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.

Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel -pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived? Every thinking being knows those moments in which the traditional frontier set by science between the organic and the inorganic, seems artificial and outdated, like every frontier drawn by men. Is not a secret antagonism to this division revealed in the very phrase 'dead matter' ? For the dead must once have been the living. Let us admit then of a substance that it is dead, have we not in so doing endowed it with an erstwhile life.

Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.