Day 42

I've grown a disdain for that word: literature.
Don't get me wrong, I like books. I like reading. I like my modest library, despite the back pains it can summon up whenever I remember having to move it as often as I have.
And despite my fondness for all these book and the stories they hold, I can't help feel sometimes: would they not have made better trees?
The fruit those trees might bare, would that not sustain us more. Or provide shelter for a family of furry lemurs, seeking reprieve from a raging storm.
For every page here had a life as a tree, before they became maps for the various states of the human condition.
And each tree had a past before we made it a prison.
For that is what books are. Paper cages with doors closed shut. And what of the prisoner? Left to lie, asleep or dead, only to be awakened at our discretion. Sometimes, not even then.
A double death: first the tree, then the tale.
We entombed these songs of old in the husks of living plants.
How foolish we were.
They were never meant to be trapped here. Museum pieces for the idle collector to keep under lock and key, gathering dust and disdain.
They are our legacy. They are our history- no. No that too sounds too clinical. They are themselves alive, whenever we remember them. Recite them: their verses move from the reader to the listener, like an blood transfusion and we're all O negative. We become universal donors.
Sometimes I look at this library and have to remind myself that these books were once trees.
They reached towards the light of day, sheltered the vulnerable. They held back storms and floods, all while nurturing the world around them.
Should we not then expect as much from the art we've memorializes upon their shrouds?
Bring stories to the light, and give the dead a second life.