About us_2nd Chapter

Now the pen lies before her, and for the first time in a long while she feels that she can reach for it again — not to write immediately, but to allow the movement itself, the one that murmurs: “Consciousness still exists. You still exist.”

The words through which we express our thoughts are like the very cells we are made of; they pass through pain, silence, and the feeling of devastation. Whoever reaches for them again does not begin from zero.

And so she begins again — with herself, with the memory that language, expression, attentiveness, and gratitude are means of self-rediscovery.

She sat down in the middle of the nearly frozen path, hidden beneath a thin layer of snow, and said aloud: “Thank you.”

It was addressed to no one in particular — not a prayer, not an attempt to gloss things over. It was a simple, joyful sensation, an honest word, spoken amid the desolate cold, where nothing needed to be explained, nothing saved.

Perhaps it was the first true act of acceptance after years of resistance — a quiet acknowledgment that even what is destroyed has carried meaning, that silence was not emptiness but necessity.

The frozen path became a line between past and present, between all that she had lost and all that she would one day rediscover within herself.

The editor from the publishing house told her that she had devoured countless manuscripts and classics in her life, entering each book as if it were a small universe. Yet her writing style, she said, was something new — raw, intense, plunging deep, demanding, sometimes even overwhelming for the new minds of a society accustomed to faster stimuli and instant gratification.

People would rather scroll for minutes or hours through nonsense on social media, simply to distract themselves, because they can hardly bear their own company. Her writing, the editor said, demanded time, focus, the endurance of discomfort, self-reflection. And precisely in that lay its power: it required the reader to engage, to be attentive, and — most of all — to be willing to grow inwardly.

If people today would read the right books, our values and our behavior toward others could change for the better.

We would handle our words, our statements, and our gestures with greater care; our relationships would become healthier, more respectful, more honest, transparent, and loving.

We would realize that silence, instead of speaking, slowly but inevitably makes every kind of relationship vanish in pain.

But what does it even mean to read the right stuff?

Perhaps it is that kind of literature that does not merely entertain us on the surface but unsettles us — that forces us to think, to feel, to question in order to understand, so that we might become better, warmer human beings.

Books that do not serve as escape, but as mirrors in which we recognize ourselves and the world anew.

To read the right things means to allow oneself to be moved, to disturb one’s own comfort, to lose the familiar distance.

For whoever reads what is truly valuable, what instructs and deepens, encounters themselves.

And whoever meets themselves in depth can no longer remain indifferent to others.

Reading becomes a form of responsibility — toward one’s own thinking, toward language, toward life itself.

People who do not read live differently — illusorily lighter, simpler, because, at heart, they hide.

They run away.

They prefer to remain on the surface, in the airy lightness of avoidance.

And this often mirrors itself in their relationships, where their inability to adapt and their ignorance gain ground.

Their thinking reacts to stimuli, not to resonance.

That is why, in necessary, deep conversations, they feel quickly attacked and reject any form of objectivity.

Ask a person what they generally read — if they read at all — and you gain an overview of who you are dealing with.

Do not be deceived by the neatly arranged spines on their shelves; they may stand there, finely displayed, yet whether the person who lives there has truly read and understood them remains uncertain.

If they refuse to discuss the subjects of those books, it means they are incapable of translating any possible reading into real life.

In theory, we can do everything.

In practice, however, it becomes clear who truly thinks, feels, understands, applies — and who merely pretends to.

It would not be wrong to say that reading is a mirror of the human being.

It shows how deeply someone is willing to encounter themselves — without makeup, without defense, without fleeing into distraction.

And if we ask ourselves what a life without mirrors would be, we might begin by looking at a life without meaningful books — without that silent counterpart that questions us, that does not flatter, but looks back.

A life without mirrors is a life without self-image — and without the possibility of questioning that image.

One may continue to exist, to act, to function — but one no longer knows who one is, or how one has become.

Reading is the inner mirror.

Writing is the attempt to bring order to what is seen or thought.

Whoever does neither — neither reads nor writes — lives on the surface of the moment: reacts, but does not reflect.

And thus, as a society, we slowly lose access to ourselves.

To be continued