I have always loved books — and more importantly, I have loved the authors who opened my mind to other ways of thinking, living, and loving. I loved those who challenged my sense of reality and time, and who revealed to me that my experiences are forged by the meaning I assign to them — the result of a network of brain regions working together. In other words, if I give my memories a different meaning, I experience different emotions. That reality has always felt magical to me, as though I am the sorcerer in my own life. Reading books — entering other worlds — taught me that.

I also admit that I am deeply partial to the classics. Twain, the Brontë sisters, Austen, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Flaubert, Woolf — just to name a few — allowed me to step inside their inner walls like a visitor to the moon.

To the moon, because I knew that not in a million years would I ever live the lives they shaped on the page, nor would I encounter such characters in my day-to-day life.

But what unites all these authors is not style, language, or ear — it is their shared excavation of unchanging human truths. The inner human condition remains forever the same: recognisable, repetitive.

And that, to me, is astonishing.

Because as a society — and within each generation — people believe their lives are unique, their challenges special and distinct to them and the era they inhabit.

Wise King Solomon once wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Yet it is only in hindsight, as our winter years quietly creep upon us, that we realise how long it takes to become wise — because for so much of life, a veil covered our minds and we comprehended only what sat directly on our nose.

Nowadays, I am keenly aware that every book I read is merely part of the continuous thread binding humanity from the beginning of time.

The only difference is the ever-evolving spoken and written word.

The heart of humanity remains still and untouched.

~ Evgenia Pimżin