LIFE

On her shelves were books of many kinds and a picture of her grandmother who could not read. Each time she finished a book, she put it back on the shelf and she looked at the picture of her grandmother and she thought, it does not make me wiser than you. It does not make me more anything than you. It makes me in America and you in Iran. It makes me in the present and you in the past. That's all.

What this fellow Vygotsky is saying, Grandmother, is very interesting. And Friere too. You would've like them. They loved children, first of all. And bell hooks, I think you would've really liked her. She's not afraid of anything. They're only doing what you would've done.

There was a man named Karl Marx. I think you would've liked him too. You don't know how much your son who is my father liked him. I could write another book about that.

There are so many of them that I wish you knew. It's not just the ones who tried to say this is how the world really works. It's the ones who told stories and sang poems. You would've liked all of them.

She liked the way her grandmother's picture sat at the top of the bookshelf. She loved her books but they were only books. They were not everything. There was something about her grandmother's life that could never fit in a book. All of them could say something about it. Or when she was reading, she would understand something about her grandmother's life that was true. But none of them could get at the whole thing. And all of the books she liked the best would've admitted that, all of the writers from all over the world from the beginning of books sat on her shelves and admitted that - Dostoyevsky and Du Bois and Marquez and Gibran and Morrison - at their best, they all admitted that they couldn't get at the whole of the life of her grandmother who could not read, and she thought that if she were ever able to join them, with a book of her own that would go on the shelves, she would want it to be under the picture of her grandmother, so there wouldn't be any confusion as to what came from what, and she would be able to say to her grandmother, you would've liked me too.