Growing up, to avoid the slammed doors and hostile silences of my home, I would bike to the public library after school and stay until closing. There, like many children who grew up in troubled families, I sought solace in stories. For hours, I’d weave through the aisles, unshelving books with impunity, catching glimpses into novel worlds and minds that transported me out of my own, if only for a moment.

Rowling and Roald Dahl, Lewis and London, Fitzgerald and Frankl: they were guides who showed me different visions for how to live. They reminded me that there was more to life than my current reality; they invited me to dream of a future different than the ones prescribed. They showed examples of love and virtue in a period of my life that felt bereft of moral and spiritual guidance. They shaped the choices I made: where I wanted to go, who I wanted to become, what I valued and believed in.

The stories we read shape our understanding of life just as surely as our lived experiences. In books we find reflection, revelation, resonance — mirrors that illuminate parts of our souls we could not otherwise perceive.

What do books redeem in us? Our loneliness, perhaps. Our hunger for connection. They remind us that countless others have walked this earth before us, who have known both the most ecstatic joy and and the most crushing despair, and lived to tell the tale. They help us discover that we are not alone despite the solitude of our minds. They allow us to create meaning from tragedy; to articulate opaque feelings and unravel tangled thoughts; to renew our faith in human goodness when cynicism threatens to harden our hearts; to rekindle a sense of wonder despite the cruelty of the world; to peer into the heart of another human being who seems utterly different from ourselves and think, Oh, you too?

I recall what Baldwin once said: “You think your pain and your heartbreak is unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.” If books are our instruments of salvation, it is because they speak to what is most human in us: our need for understanding, meaning, hope, wonder. They save us from, as Kant wrote, our “self-incurred tutelage,” by pulling off the soft, smothering mask of ignorance and revealing the vast worlds of our imagination. They redeem the wholeness of our souls. For it is often within the pages of a book where we first truly encounter ourselves.