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I am grateful for the forgotten and almost lost books

Among the reasons to be grateful (not only when Thanksgiving is celebrated, but every day) I choose this time to share one of my favorite reasons, perhaps not the first on the list, but certainly a reason for constant gratitude: the forgotten and almost lost books.

These are those books that one reads and then they find a place among the other books in the library and there they remain, waiting to be rediscovered and reread one day. Each book has its own personality: some prefer to hide (perhaps because of their age or content) and others seem to ask that we not forget them.

But, despite their best efforts, there will always be a book that one forgets if one has already read it, or that one remembers having read it, but has already forgotten what the book said. Other books are so forgotten that one forgets that he forgot them. The waters of Lethe cover them perpetually.

Sometimes, however, a phrase, a word, a thought and a simple coincidence (one looks for a book and finds another) allow the forgotten book to be remembered and the book in question acquires a new life, a kind of resurrection or metamorphosis, because it stops being the book it was before to become the book it is now.

My gratitude, however, is not based on mere physical reunion with the book, but on something deeper: one finds oneself with oneself, with the thoughts and emotions that one felt the first time one read the previously forgotten book, now recovered. It’s a rediscovery both of the book and of oneself. 

The questions and the marks in the margins of the book make us see how much we did not understand the first time we read that book and then warn us not to believe that this time we did. We may have gained some ground, but the dialogue with the book and with oneself (the one you used to be and the one you are now) will continue.

The underlined paragraphs or the notes on important or central concepts or topics take us back to the moment when those paragraphs and those ideas were a novelty, a discovery, a challenge. And so, by rediscovering them, they become an invitation to open our mind and heart to new discoveries and new challenges.

A forgotten, dusty book is just an accumulation of paper and ink. But, by opening and reading it, the mind opens, and one then learns to read oneself. As a wise grandfather of the community once told me: "You start reading books and end up reading people."

Therefore, among the many reasons for gratitude, I feel grateful for those books that patiently wait for one to read them. Or they wait for us to return to them when we are better prepared, to see how much one has really progressed in life instead of how much one thinks one has progressed.

My gratitude, then, to all the lost and forgotten books.  

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