Since I remember, I have been surrounded by books, a lot of books· books numbered in the hundreds and thousands, lined up on dozens of rows of shelve· books Father inherited from his uncle or bought in his youth and continued collecting for the rest of his life. As a child I counted them, sorted and arranged them, leafed through each one, I read most. Later, I used to sign by hand or stamp with my name everything I bought or thought it belonged to me. With pocket money I started creating an own sizeable as much as cherished collection. I read a lot of them continuously, systematically: underlining the main ideas and points the author touched upon, making notes in margins and notebooks. I did not merely read, but I studied them: in breadth and depth, with the peculiar personalised system and styles of study I developed along the way, as it felt more suited to my cognitive and perceptual abilities and idiosyncrasy, and more conducive in accumulating knowledge and making its comprehension effective. The frequency and intensity of reading books and the dedication to studying them remained undiminished from early childhood through the present day and it will continue so for as long as I retain my faculties and until the death of the human spirit in me. For the environment I grew up in, the opportunity I was given as a child and young man -to be immersed in a plethora of books and volume of knowledge they render accessible, I feel fortunate and grateful to my parents for providing the initial spark.
Father, the de facto
family spokesman, often praised and congratulated himself in front of friends, colleagues
and acquaintances as the charismatic educator, who taught me how to read well before
I turned four. All started, he was saying, by asking me to read the names of
boats in the port of Hydra in our summer holidays when I turned or the sign
board of the shops of Thessaloniki at four. Deep dives from early age into books
made reading them addictive. An avid reader, a "bookworm", Ι was devouring books at a rate
that has been maintained unabated throughout life and occasionally accelerated by
the positive feedback to the spirit a conductive study environment and ambience
can provide. With an infinite world of knowledge stretching out before me, I branched
out my studying endeavours to new subjects and authors and a diverse spectrum
of sources: just as a tree grows –the ever growing ‘tree of knowledge’ in this
case, from a sapling quickly grows taller and wider, sprouts branches and expands
in many directions. From the first years of school until today, at a more or
less undiminished pace, hundreds, perhaps thousands of books passed through and
worn out by my hands· books in which I always deliberately left the markings of
the meticulous and avid reader: the underlining, the notes in the margins,
folded pages, the gray-black or oiled fingerprints, my name and signature above
the completion date in the top corner of one of the first pages, later stamps
with my name. (As soon as I finished school, I hastened to obtain an ink stamp
and pad, along with a deck of business cards, as a kind of self-affirmation of the
scholar and scientist, yet unrealisable, invisible to and unacknowledged from
the outside world). Everything I underlined or noted in these books I believed
and still do, rather foolishly, would be traces left for posterity and evidence
that an undersigned existence honoured with time and intellectual effort, a not
insignificant period of his life, a particular work and its author. And at those
early stages in life, I used to read most genres of written work without a particular
inclination: literary novels and short stories, classical or modern, philosophical
essays, current political analyses, art critiques, scientific articles and
books, and so on.
I am compelled to
reaffirm some truisms on the subject of reading, because it occupies a significant
part in the lives of devout readers, the ‘bookworms’ as they say, like me. The
epigrammatic metaphor of Uberto Eco, that reading books allows us to experience
through the power of imagination other lives and existences, fictional or not,
outside our own, would suffice to justify the endless hours spent in bending
over books -as far as I am concerned. Indeed, reading, especially novels and
stories, transported me each time to different places and eras, societies and the
souls of human being, as articulated formed by the author. The characters in
them, their actions and passions on occasions stirred me. Throughout their stories
I found my own feelings fluctuate in tandem between joy and sadness, I smiled or
my eyes were misted over whilst tuning into the feelings of their heroes, I
exercised empathy. Several times I identified with parts of their lives and
thoughts and ideas, I reflect parts of my life and existence behind words and
sayings, thoughts and actions. The emotions from the actions and thoughts and the
psychology of the heroes of a novel, as they spring from the pages, are reflected
and re-enlivened in the mind, extrapolated by imagination, often stirring
emotions and bringing a smile or tears in the eyes. The latter, in particular, is
often affected– for reasons that I have not been able to fully explain other
than an inherent sensitivity to real or fictitious human drama, by the approach
to the last lines of a book narrative and the end of the human story it tells.
It is the same range of emotions, of melancholy and sadness, that often affect us
when we feel that a chapter of real life is reaching its conclusion: a
relationship, a change of house and neighborhood, a long period of working with
the same group colleagues in the same place, a child who grows up and leaves
home, the death of a person who was a part of our lives. There is a natural
explanation to this: each ending reminds us of the passage of time, a past
without return to it, a step closer to the very end.
The equally significant
scientific and philosophical readings do not produce the emotional effects with
literature. In a sense dry and impersonal, academic and analytical, they aim
exclusively at the transfer of knowledge, whilst they empower logical thinking
and judgement. No doubt they open our eyes and minds outwards, into the material
world that surrounds us, as well as inwards, to the depths of our own selves,
to self-awareness and conscience. All this knowledge, all the theories and
systems of ideas we acquaint ourselves with and before we adopt some of them, eventually
become integral part of our lives, they expand it to hitherto unexplored dimensions,
guide us in our present and future existence, enhance the meaning of our past, and
sometimes, perhaps subconsciously, shape the uncanny world of emotions within.
After all we have been
afforded by nature a unique opportunity of an infinitesimal in time and space existence
in this world, within this mind-blowing universe, as well as a miraculous brain
and the consciousness to perceive life and this existence, to give it some direction
in its finite journey and to express ourselves with words and actions. It would
be a tragic omission and a great loss in its value if we do not to strive to
understand this existence in this world to the maximum possible extent.
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