Book: The history of reading

National regimes need to lose memory, because they call the book useless luxuries; totalitarian regimes have, that we did not think, because they prohibit, destroy, and impose censorship; and those and others need to turn us into fools that will calmly accept their degradation, and because they prefer to feed us with manna porridge instead of reading.

In metro Toronto sitting in front of me, a woman reads pinguinos edition of "Labyrinths" by Borges. I want to call out to her, wave my hand, to say that we of the same faith. Only due to the fact that this woman holds in her hands a certain book, she, whose face I have forgotten, whose clothes I didn't even closer to me than many people I meet daily.