When I first went off to college, I was enthusiastic about wanting to know why certain people acted in certain ways. I signed up for a bunch of psychology courses because I was finally going to discover the secrets of human behavior. Along with all the psychology, I decided to take a literature course just to change it up a bit. In high school I was not a good reader. I preferred math to reading. But in my senior year English class, we were assigned Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter. There, I finally discovered that books were not about words; they were about ideas and feelings. I saw how good writing could paint pictures in my mind. I imagined the big scarlet “A” popping out in bright red on the heroine’s chest because of her adultery. Not a fair way to treat a passionate person—well psychology was going to help me understand all that.

So, once the semester started and the psychology courses began, I was looking mostly at statistics about psychosis and lists of neurotic disorders. I was bored and I realized I was not going to find out about people after all. Maybe in my junior or senior year I would start to learn the mechanism of behavior, but as a freshman I had to suffer through it. But in my English class, we were reading DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, where people displayed intense emotions and expressed the essence of psychological attraction. Finally, I found it! I realized a good writer understood human behavior better than any psychologist. I was hooked.

I switched majors and dove into literature. I loved Shakespeare. Where I previously feared the immensity of his work and the obscurity of his language, I came to value the subtleties of his humanity. I realized his Comedies were underrated, his Dramas enthralling and his Histories—ways of seeing the private burden of public figures. My senior year was exclusively devoted to the brilliance of the Irish writer James Joyce. We spent two semesters dissecting the intricacies of Ulysses in discovering how archetypal myths are played out in everyday life. Now with my own library of over 3,000 books, these friends of the Ages sit on my shelves teaching me every day about people and life, beauty and love. My favorite saying is: “If you want to learn something new, read an old book.”