She called it the ‘Dust of Ideas’ and it made me…
She called it the ‘Dust of Ideas’ and it made me laugh because she was always coming up with melodramatic phrases like that. In her hyper-talkative way she captured my ear one autumn morning between buildings as I slung her backpack over my shoulder and she clutched some ancient tome she’d salvaged from the library’s stack of books earmarked for recycling. In the late morning sun she peeled the book open and watched with awe as the fifty or sixty year old dust came swirling out and joined the lazy drone of ladybugs dancing through the light.
She told me the Dust of Ideas was the visible magic in old books, even boring ones, even bad ones. To her, every book had something worthwhile in it, even if it was just the smell of moulding pages or the sound of a creaking spine. She clutched that book, open to an indiscriminate page and pressed against her chest while she spoke with great animation about libraries and this new pet concept of idea dust.
It wasn’t until many years later, desperate and reaching for any kind of handle, that I found myself in the back room of an anonymous library, shuffling stacks of worthless old books that I thought of her Dust of Ideas. I grabbed a ratty volume and hooked my thumbs over it, feeling the stiff pages crinkle and snap like old joints after a long sleep, peeling the covers apart. The dust puffed forth and I picked a paragraph in a desultory way, ready at last to let the ideas sink into my skin the way she had.
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