Marcel Proust - Sobre a Leitura

A 1905 preface to the French translation of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Sobre a Leitura is a salutary reflection on the act of reading, its nature and its mystery.

Evoking childhood - a theme dear to the author of Em Busca do Tempo Perdido - and going back to the tasty pages read in the shade of the hazelnut trees on long summer days, Proust confesses to being a passionate and voracious reader, at the same time as introducing us to reading as the supreme act of human transformation. Each line of a good book, instead of inciting passive assimilation of other people's truths, of being “a honey prepared by others and which we only have to collect from the shelves”, contains an invitation to discovery and reflection. In silence and solitude, the author concludes, reading is a means, not an end. It's having “the magic keys that open the door to dwellings deep within ourselves that we wouldn't have known how to enter”. A timeless essay for lovers of the enigmatic universe of the page, in Proust's magnificent prose.