Can you imagine what it meant to grow up in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s? If a shell didn’t kill you, hopelessness surely would. And death by despair is a thousand times worse, and more final, than death by a missile. But something kept me hopeful and alive, day after day, despite all the misery and desolation surrounding me. Something almighty, intensely transformative – something magical: it was literature.
I didn’t read to learn (the latter was a mere collateral benefit); I read to unlearn. To unlearn hate and fear and distress and despair. To unlearn closed doors and clipped wings and tunnels without a light at the end of them. I read to forget everything and everyone that was trying to kill me, outside as well as inside.
