Ahmad Gamal Saad-Eddin

In my childhood and distant teenage years, I used to get very upset when my father and mother objected to my desire to buy a new book, arguing that I already had unread books at home. I felt there was something wrong with that logic, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint the problem or find a way to respond, because it is, in fact, natural to think that we should read the books we already have before considering buying a new one.

Over time, as the library grew and I let myself indulge over many long years, my small, modestly numbered collection turned into a truly large library, covering every field and subject, whether related to my work or completely unrelated (I honestly don’t know why I own a book about the history of coffee production in Uganda). And it became logically certain that I would never be able to read all these books in my lifetime, assuming, for example, that the average human life span is around 70–80 years.

When all this happened, the idea began to take shape in my mind.

The thing I couldn’t express back when I was a teenager asking my parents to buy me a book was that the whole matter is about keeping the possibility alive, the possibility of reading all these things, of reading everything, even though it’s impossible. If we were to add up the number of pages and divide it by the days a person has left to live, we’d find it’s impossible. But keeping the possibility alive is, it seems to me, the one thing that distinguishes humans from any other living creature. And it stems entirely, in my view, from language, our ability to imagine things that don’t exist and aren’t real.

That’s why we live every day, why we wake up, go to work, come back, save and spend, laugh, travel, have beautiful times and miserable ones, love and hate and fight. We do all this with madness, cruelty, violence, humility, and anger, fully aware and certain that we will all die, that everyone around us will die, and that a hundred years from now, new people will come, and they too will all die.

Keeping the possibility alive is something humans do every day, simply by being human.

And that’s why, Mom, I’m going into the bookstore to buy a new book, knowing full well that there’s a big, logical chance I won’t read it. But there’s also a chance I will read it, and that it will turn out to be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read in my life—changing my life, letting me live all the possible and impossible lives. And maybe, just maybe, it will let me live forever.