Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

“Mommy, why is that man buying so many books?” the young girl (certainly no more than 10 years old) asked her mother when she saw me buying a few books at a second-hand store. “I don’t know, sweetie. Perhaps he likes to read,” the mother cleverly replied.

I did my best to ignore the dialogue behind me and I just replied with a smile. The mother, however, took the opportunity to ask me a question. “Sir, do you really read all those books?” “Of course not,” I was tempted to say. “I just use them as ornaments and to level unleveled tables.”

However, my good judgment and my honesty took over, and therefore I said: “Yes, I do read them all. Not all at the same time, of course. But I do my best to read them all.” After that, the mother replied with yet another insightful answer: “Aaah.”

I put the books inside a plastic bag and went back to my car, but I kept thinking why a little girl is amazed by seeing somebody buying a few books and why a mother is amazed by somebody who actually read those books.

Had I bought five or six videogames, or five or six popular magazines, or five or six chocolate bars, or phones, or lottery tickets, nobody would have questioned me. Nobody would have asked me if I really wanted to play those games, or read those magazines, or eat that chocolate, or use the phones. But it seems that with books it is a totally different story.

Why is has to be like that? Perhaps because books are something from the past, an obsolete method, almost extinct, to access information. Perhaps because almost nobody takes time to read, except for a few lines on a screen, and usually reading without any understanding. Or perhaps reading is no longer valued as an intellectual activity, having been replaced by the instant answers provided by online search engines.

It is true I belong to a different time, a time when my father took me almost every Saturday morning to a second-hand store to buy one or two used books so I could have my own small personal library.

Those Saturday-morning trips lasted many years and helped me to create a library I still have. But, even more important, they also created in me the need to continue with a tradition that connects me not only with books, but also with my father. In a way, each book I add to my library is at the same time a tribute to my father and a sign of hope for the future.

However, my past experience does not fully explain my present urgency to buy and read used books. I know there are many other ways of accessing information. I use many of them, with great emotional and intellectual benefit. But books still have that “I don’t know what.”

Why, dear little girl, I but books? Simply, because I like them. That’s it.