BOOK are like meals we eat -- the difference is that the meals nurse the body, and the books the soul! Ralph Waldo Emerson, basking in the solitude of his own choice on the banks of Walden Pond, Massachusetts (US) -- where personages like Henry David Thoreau also lived for some time -- found books as his lone and wonderful companions. True, even before he chose to isolate himself and get engaged in profound meditation about life, Ralph Waldo Emerson loved the company of books. But when a youngster asked him if he really remembered all the thousands of books he had read, the great philosopher-poet said in disarming simplicity: I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. That acknowledgement that books made Emerson what he became has a universal dimension -- for, everybody who has taken to books for spiritual nourishment says the same thing. He -- or she -- may not remember every book read or every word consumed, but all that material has gone into making of the personality, nursing of the fine nuances that differentiate human person from other species.

 

What books achieve is not just add up or pad up information, but also nurse emotional quotient, cajole one’s instincts, caress one’s intuitions into finer nuances of being. True, there are countless people who do not happen to read books for they may even be illiterate, but are fine people. But that is not the subject of our discourse at this juncture. What is central to our thinking is the role the books play in our lives. It is really not easy -- even for a Ralph Waldo Emerson -- to pick up the best words to describe what the books actually achieve or the effect they have on the reader’s inner being. True, books help the reader achieve higher levels of meditative condition. Yet, the books do have the power to raise the reader’s level of consciousness and turn it into a finer fabric whose weave is not easy to understand.

 

Put in other words, the text of the book has the capacity to alter the texture of the human personality all right -- provided, of course, the reader has a totally and really open mind that is ready to receive even the finest and faintest of hints of spiritual elevation. When the process is so complex, how can one really remember every book one happens to read? Nevertheless, one cannot deny the great effect -- of depth as well as of elevation -- the books have on the human mind. Ralph Waldo Emersons are not actually be made only by or from or on the inputs from the books. But they do acknowledge the tremendous impact the books have had on them. Possibly, that gratitude ... that is where the essence of their personalities lies ... may be the book’s gift to them.