Books
Books have an effect on you. I’d be a different person if I’d read different books. Or if I hadn’t read any at all. I don’t read any more, but it’s too late. It was too late a long time ago.
I own a dictionary, because I’ve absorbed all these words without knowing what they mean. They’re lodged in different parts of my body. Sometimes they make their way to the surface, where they look like pimples, and then I look them up in my dictionary. I know you’d expect them to just be in my head. That’s a mistake people make about words. The fact is that some words settle in fatty deposits around the body, other words are made up of asbestos-like fibers and become entwined with muscle tissue, others seek out particular organs, and some seep into the bones. There are a lot of words in the head, but not the majority of them, and not the most problematic ones. They’re just the words we’re most aware of, so we think that’s all there are.
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