When I was young, I thought books were keys to the vault of answers. If I read enough, deeply enough, I’d know what to think. I mistook tradition for commandment.

Decades later, I sit among these same volumes—dog-eared, underlined, marked with my old urgency—and realize they never wanted to be scripture. They wanted to be conversation.

I open the great books now to meet their authors not as priests of truth but as humans. Humans who wrestled with their own blind spots and brilliance, whose words can illuminate or mislead. Who can challenge me precisely because I refuse to worship them.

Authority tempts us with the promise of certainty. But certainty is cheap where thinking is costly. The more I read, the more I learned to hold even my admiration in question, to say: yes, clever—but is it true? True to the world I see, to the lives I know, to the suffering and the wonder that fill our days.

This is what reason is for in everyday life. Not to pronounce judgment from on high but to compare, to weigh, to test. To put my experience beside another’s, whether found in a book or across a table, and see what emerges in the space between.

I write now, too—essays, poems, stray thoughts—never with the ambition to hand down answers. Only to offer another voice to the ongoing dialogue. To trouble certainty. To invite readers to think alongside, not behind.