Days [ ) A kind of escape | Susan Sontag, Letter to Borges, 1996
.
“You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been.
If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear.
I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams,
and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.
Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from
the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books.
Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”
Susan Sontag, from ‘Letter to Borges’, June 13, 1996
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
Sylvia Plath
.