My Father’s Books

Differences

11 Dif­ fer­ ences Even be­ fore I had ­ learned to read and write, my ­ father’s books,­ guarded by my ­ mother’s wake­ ful eye, ­ served as my play­ things. Since then I have had a pas­ sion for the large, ­ tightly bound, multi­ col­ ored vol­ umes and have rev­ eled in them with no ­ thought as to ­ whether I would ever read them. While still an un­ taught child I could eas­ ily “read” var­ i­ ous ­ scripts. Even at that time, I “read” that my ­ father had books writ­ ten in Ar­ a­ bic, Cy­ ril­ lic, and Latin let­ ters. At that time, all books were the same at first­ glance, but when I ­ opened them they im­ me­ di­ ately be­ came dif­ fer­ ent from one an­ other. But these “dif­ fer­ ences,” texts in dif­ fer­ ent alpha­ bets, began to have sig­ nif­i­ cance for me, to have spec­ i­ fic­ ity, be­ fore I had yet en­ tered the world of inter­ pret­ able signs. The var­ i­ ous alpha­ bets ap­ peared to me as the first mir­ rors of fate in which, in var­ i­ ous ways, I would be re­ flected and would dis­ cover my­ self. I had to dis­ cover in the three dif­ fer­ ent ­ shapes of sym­ bols in the man­ u­ scripts that one ­ unique form with which I would iden­ tify, the one fated to re­ main until the end of my life for­ ever in the cen­ ter of the lab­ y­ rinth. ...