Osmosis

We call it “reading,” as when you first recognized your mother’s smile or when you learned your ABCs. It’s what we do as human beings. We read Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver, and Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff. Books constructed whole worlds in our minds through our eyes. We learned, eventually, that learning can never be completed, while others’ traumas and fears, others’ gifts and others’ dreams, often different from our own, became recognizable, even familiar.