It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. - Anthony Doerr

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

A library, no mater how humble or grand, is a series of sacred gateways. You pass through them and leave your own city behind; you journey through time and space; and for a little while, you escape the confines of your own circumstances. Each of us who are readers gets to live through a multiplicity of eras; we get to tiptoe through, to borrow Jorge Luis Borge’s phrase, ‘a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.