Thought of the day

"...One of the bishops said something particularly poignant. He said that a man's mind is like a library. And when a man dies, especially a man like Peter, it is like a great library burning to the ground." - Andrew Tobias, from "The best little boy in the world grows up"

Death and reading, both impact me in different ways. Reading connects me to the lives that died before I came into the world and the ideas that were dead before I read of their existence. What will be my written word to survive my death and what will be written of me? Will I have stood for opening up ideas or will I have metaphorically burned books in my life? Where does my quest for knowledge, insight and compassion end? Where do I tolerate injustice? What is in the library of my mind that I do hide from the world?

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. - Joseph Brodsky