There’s a place I visit without going anywhere. It usually begins when I’m reading. I’m holding a book, and something in it—a word, a sentence, or an image—shifts my mind sideways. Suddenly, I’m no longer in my house.

I’m in a library next to a pond.

A white building sat atop a small hill. The simple columns made it seem as if it had been there long before I arrived, at least to an eight-year-old. It didn’t resemble my school or the stores along the main road. It looked like it was guarding something precious. The paint shone so brightly in the afternoon sun that you had to squint as you climbed the steps. Inside, whatever was hidden wasn’t gold or coins but something you could carry home in your arms.

The doors were heavy and closed with a soft thud that silenced the street. Inside, the temperature stayed steady. In summer, it felt cool; in winter, warm, but the atmosphere was the same—a quietness that makes you walk more carefully; your shoes made a dull sound on the wooden floor; the people instinctively lowered their voices; sunlight moved slowly across long tables and wooden chairs as the afternoon drifted toward evening.

Behind the building, the pond spread wide. With bread in my pocket, I watched which ducks rushed forward and which stayed back. I threw pieces near the shy ones first, gently coaxing them closer before the bigger birds gobbled everything up.

Across the pond stood the old mill and a row of trees. On still days, they reflected in the water—roof, windows, branches—so clearly that, for a moment, it looked like there were two mills and two rows of trees, one right-side up and the other upside down. When a duck crossed the surface, the reflected image bent and wavered before settling back.

Back then, I didn’t think about reflections. I just watched the water settle after each disturbance. But something about that double image stayed with me. Light and water could alter how the mill appeared without changing the mill itself. Years later, I realized that memory and writing do something similar.

We called it the Roslyn Library, but its official name was The Bryant Library. The letters were formal and deeply carved into the stone. I didn’t yet know that William Cullen Bryant was a poet or that he had once walked through the village of Roslyn. I only knew the name sounded old, as if it belonged to the same era as Abraham Lincoln—the kind of name printed in my history books in heavy type.

I started going there regularly in 1954. Dwight Eisenhower was president. The TV in our house was small and black-and-white, and adults talked about communists as if they might be hiding anywhere. I didn’t understand politics, but I knew the world beyond our street mattered.

That year, I watched baseball on our small TV, sitting so close that my knees nearly touched the cabinet. When Willie Mays ran with his back to home plate and caught the long fly ball off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, I saw it as clearly as if I had been standing in the outfield grass. Later, I described the play to others as if I had been there.

I was learning something unconsciously: a story, told vividly enough, could immerse you in events you’d never witnessed firsthand.

The children’s shelves were low enough that I could run my finger along the spines as I walked. I chose books by color and thickness, then opened them to a random page and read the first paragraph right there in the aisle.

At night, I read my borrowed books in bed by flashlight, the light hidden under the blanket, listening for footsteps in the hallway. I turned the pages slowly so they wouldn’t rustle. When the floor creaked outside my room, I switched off the light and held my breath until the house settled again.

I read every Oz book the library had. Oz didn’t feel like an escape into another world; it felt more like instruction. The moment I revisited most often was the Wizard’s reveal: a man hidden behind a curtain, pulling levers to produce a commanding voice. I don’t remember laughing. I remember feeling unsettled—the noise, the smoke, the authority—and then realizing there was nothing behind it. I recognized I had seen something similar before, though I couldn’t quite identify it.

But the story didn’t end in disappointment. The Scarecrow had already solved problems, the Tin Man had already cared, and the Lion had already acted bravely. They didn’t become worthy because someone told them they were. They were told because they had already acted.

I didn’t realize at the time, but I was beginning to gather examples of the various ways someone can live.

Soon, I reached for thicker books. I opened a biography of Benjamin Franklin and paused at the illustration of him flying a kite into a storm, a metal key tied to the string, lightning racing toward his hand. I tried to imagine choosing to stand under a dark sky, inviting an answer from it. Pages later, he was in France, speaking with men in powdered wigs, representing a country not yet secure in its existence. The same person who experimented with electricity negotiated with kings and helped invent civic institutions.

I began to sense that a life could be large.

Then I discovered Clarence Darrow. I read about the Scopes trial—a courtroom in the Tennessee heat, a lawyer questioning belief itself with measured sentences. I read his plea in the Leopold and Loeb case, not denying guilt but arguing against execution. He opposed without shouting.

Words themselves could be action. Different lives, different centuries, different kinds of courage—but all asking the same question: how does a person live well?

Then I opened The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I understood enough to feel troubled. The people described weren’t imaginary monsters from stories but ordinary citizens participating in events I couldn’t reconcile with the hopeful world I’d been building from Oz, Willie Mays, Franklin, and Darrow. I asked why no one stopped it. I asked why Jews didn’t fight back. The adults around me didn’t know how to answer.

At that time, history became an integral part of my life.

I came home one afternoon and told my mother that my music teacher, Mr. F., had hit me. She listened, then called him. I stood nearby as she spoke. Her voice stayed controlled, almost neutral. She hung up, approached me, and slapped my face—that was the only time she ever hit me. Then she said, “That is the first and last time you will ever insult a Holocaust survivor.”

I had mocked his accent earlier that day. There was no lecture, just the realization that the man I saw every day had a life hidden from me, yet still alive within him. Until that afternoon, the Holocaust had existed for me only in books. Afterward, it took a prominent place at the front of a classroom.

I began to realize that history doesn’t vanish when the page is turned. It lives on in the people who experienced it. I returned to the library and read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Anne Frank. The pages no longer focused on distant events; they depicted something real, people I knew.

I rode to the library in every season. The winter wind made my eyes water, and the summer heat warmed the handlebars beneath my hands. Before heading home, I stopped at the pond, broke bread, and watched the water smooth after each disturbance.

Back then, I didn’t see any of this as education. I thought of it simply as going to the library. Only much later did I realize I had been learning how a human life can exist across more than one time. Through books and through other people, lives continued beyond the years that contained them.

I thought I was borrowing books. In fact, I was borrowing lives. And once you’ve lived enough lives through books, another possibility eventually emerges—

Perhaps one day you might return something to those shelves.

Even now, when a sentence catches, and the present relaxes its hold, I can still see the pond behind that white building: Two mills. Two rows of trees. One sits above the water, while the other continues quietly below.