True value of texts is priceless, receiving a copy of manuscript of a sailors many years of his adventurous voyages is like receiving a huge inheritance from someone who is not related to you. Its contents are so valuable you cannot afford to lose them, many years of gruesome probably decades shrank onto a piece of paper, and you get all that with just a few pennies, What a nice thing it is to get a lifetimes worth of work for just a few coins, what a joy to have biographies? How the records of many centuries and millennia with their detailed events are summed up into a simple book you can go through in just a week, you didn’t have to live that long in order to acquire that knowledge you need.
We travel with books without having to leave the comfort of our homes, with the authors words and together with the protagonists we cross vast deserts enduring scorching heat, we then get to reach the oasis and rest under a cool shade, we wash our heads and our burning bodies with cool waters from the oasis pools, their burdens become our burdens, their enemies are our enemies, their fears become our fears, and their joys become our comfort.
It’s such a wonderful thing to access someone’s else whole life worth of work for just a few pennies, forty years of travel, adventure, discovery and recording perused through in less than four hours, for those that do not yet know the many treasures hidden in books, I feel sorry for them, I will not tell them anything, I will leave that as their own decision, let them find out that for themselves. In some works, you can feel, taste and smell the feasts the author was invited to attend, right from where you are sitting, though the event took place a long time ago many thousands of kilometers away, it’s all smoking out to you from the pages, when they start talking about struggling to eat unripe mangoes, my mouth begins to water with a sour taste, when they tried to stich one of their fellow traveler’s wounds who accidentally stepped on a bear’s trap, and were trying to do it with no anesthetics, I begin to feel sorry for the poor guy, I begin to wish I was there to help others pin him to the ground and try to prevent him from screaming too much.
