Good morning, CoSo!

It's a gloomy, drizzly day outside, a good day to sit indoors, light a candle, and read a book.

Books are wonderful; in general, people who read a lot of books have a broader understanding and more nuanced emotional content than people who don't, just because they've had a lot of virtual experiences that it might take centuries to have in real life.

But books are not enough.
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If you rely on books alone for your experiences, you can end up with a very one-sided, skewed view of what the world is like. Books are so human-centered (being of course human creations) that they encourage the notion that only human things matter, that the real world is the one made of language and words, and that everything outside that is just a reflection of the words we use; and consequently that all of our problems can be solved by just making more words or changing their order.
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But that's not really true. The real world consists of stars and planets and moons, rock and lava and ocean and air, plants and animals and microorganisms, things that are not human at all and don't live in our world or accept our conventions. In our effort to creat a world safe for humans, we cut a swath through the natural world that words have no power to patch up. And if we're buried in books, we can't see, say, how each flight of birds this year is smaller than last year's.
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Human problems are important, and not just to humans; when we start killing each other, we kill off so much else besides, without even remarking on it. But humans are not really the center of the universe, and one of the best things humans can do for themselves is to de-center themselves and drop the arrogant notion that solving human problems also solves the bigger problem of *being human* in a world where humanity is so inimical to its own environment. We need to think outside ourselves.
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