Kevin Tosca

Dynamite

Reading the other night, it dawned on me that I was reading, that I was holding an object called a book in my hands, that I was interpreting, deciphering, absorbing little black letters purposefully arranged on white paper.
Reading.
A book.
I imagined, I don’t know why but it felt true, that I was the only one in the universe doing that at that particular moment. And I felt like some small, vulnerable, plant-eating, antisocial dinosaur. I felt that books, the kind of honest, raw, unmerciful and magnificent books that have made me who and what I am, would become extinct, that paper itself, like I would, would disappear, that this experience I treasure would be mocked, forgotten.
It was a strange, self-conscious, pleasurably sentimental yet totally disturbing moment, taking place, as it did, in an unbelievably disturbing time because what is a reader, an unapologetic lover of books, to do in this century?
Run? Fight? Laugh it all off?
I did what I always do.
I read on to see what happens next, longing, without hope and without despair, for the words to blow me away.