2012-10-20 – My son Nat and I went to Barnes and Noble this afternoon and sat in the café together browsing our books when I noticed a woman reading a chapter in a book on English morphology.

Now, I don’t have a clue what morphology is, so I came home and looked it up in Wikipedia. There I learned . . . well nothing. I would say that I know as much about morphology now that I’ve read an article about it as I did before I read the article. I kinda thought that would be the case. Words that end in “ology” are often like that.

Nevertheless, the woman at B&N seemed very interested in this book and her interest was inspiring.

Here we were in a bookstore with thousands of books on incomprehensible and unspeakably dull topics. But somewhere there are people who are interested in them.

And more than that: somewhere there are people who are passionate enough about these dull and incomprehensible topics to spend months or years writing books about them.

Think about it. A bookstore (or a library . . . or the Internet) is a repository of passion.

I bet you never thought about it that way. I bet you thought a bookstore was a collection of nicely bound stacks of paper.

* * *

Morphology’s gobbledygook
Is something you can’t overlook.
I don’t care for fashion.
I’ve just got this passion,
And I’m writing it down in a book.