The stalls at Azbakeya

The second-hand book stalls at Azbakeya go on for longer than anyone expects.

Walk between them and the spines run from the pavement to above your head on both sides. Textbooks, old novels, memoirs of people nobody remembers, manuals for machines that no longer exist, poetry with someone else's pencil notes in the margin. It is impossible to stand there and not feel how little of it you have read.

Each of those books cost someone a year of their life, sometimes ten. Somebody sat with a question they could not leave alone, worked at it until it made sense, and then gave the whole thing away to whoever might pick it up. Most of them never knew who that would be. Many of the copies on those tables have not been opened in a long time.

The feeling is a mix of humility and appetite. Humility, because the amount you do not know is visibly enormous, stacked up and gathering dust. Appetite, because every bit of it is right there, offered freely, for the price of an afternoon and a little attention.

We are surrounded by far more than we will ever finish. That is not a reason to give up. It is an invitation that stays open for as long as we care to accept it, and all it asks is that we pick one up and start.