Some people have survived by eating paper.
Even authors have to eat paper sometimes. Their predecessor must have been that
anonymous monk who used to write with his right hand and eat with his left
hand. They say that one prophetic morning he realized he had eaten everything
he had written. What had really happened inside his body? For the monk, what
was the meaning of the act of writing, being a writer, immortality, and his
potential readers? Maybe he had found some fundamental answers which he had
eaten, in rage, in hunger, by virtue of habit, or because there was nothing
else to do.
A few hundred years later, in my
native Albania, the monk has been reincarnated into another anonymous
being. This slave to the lord was a poor man, the son of another poor and
anonymous man, yet he inherited a bookcase from his father. His father’s dying
words were:
“Money, poverty and life, these your children will find by themselves, but not books like these…”