I am a wyverary

[dichroic]

Here’s where I make a confession: I never read either Fahrenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles. For that matter, I still haven’t read the Foundation books, or Childhood’s End or any number of other classics of the literature of ideas. I might get to them. I might not. I seem to have odd reading tastes even among my favorite genres, and an odd resistance to reading the books I ought to read even when they’re recommended by people who love them rather than enforced by teachers.

But though I haven’t read Bradbury other than in short stories, I still owe him for his influence on the authors who did form me. In honor of Bradbury, those authors and authors and books in general, I want to link to Yuki_Onna’s wonderful essay “We are all wyveraries”, because it’s wonderful. I’m quoting out of context, so I should say that by “we” and “all”, she doesn’t mean {all humans” but “all of us who grew into ourselves in and because of libraries”.

We are all half beast and half library. We are half big, awkward, occasionally fire breathing thing who want to be loved so terribly much, who want to be useful and good, and half all the books that ever stuck with us, changed the construction of our brains and the architecture of our hearts. We are half creatures afraid of bumping into the world the wrong way and roasting something accidentally and half a jumble of instincts toward wonder and kindness borne to our innermost selves on rafts of so many books and stories. We are all wyveraries.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.