Part of the reason we like books is that they are timeless: temporal transportation at your fingertips. One can always return to a beloved chapter from the past and relive beautiful moments again.
It doesn't matter what the present or the future holds. You can still go back and re-experience the joy in the moment, and it is no less real -- the visceral emotion, the plaintiveness, the sorrow, the bliss. In each case, the sense of possibility exists, and exists again. Every journey, every return, holds the promise of different endings made possible again. Because these works are written, there is a mutability about the story. Even if you've read the ending a thousand times, in the moment it occurs, the tale is
yet to be written. The characters may yet gain that ending where happiness awaits. Oh such belief! Belief held so closely that we might call it faith.
In this turning and returning, of pages, of times, of lives, there resides immense hope. Dangerous, narcotic, heart-shattering hope -- but lovely nonetheless.
