> [!cite]- Metadata > 2026-03-04 23:50 > Status: #book > Lexicon: > Tags: `Read Time:` 61 I read everything in the school library, which contained an entirely arbitrary selection of works, and everything I could borrow from my teachers - works on geography and history, travel writings, novels, biographies - and sat up late in the evening over reference books and atlases. My mind thus gradually created a kind of ideal landscape in which the Arabian desert, the realm of the Aztecs, the continent of Antarctica, the snow-covered Alps, the North-West Passage, the river Congo, and the Crimean peninsula formed a single panorama, populated by all the figures proper to those places. 64 I had felt it once before, when I picked up an injured rabbit from the headland of a field, and its heart stopped beating in my hand for fear. --- ### **References**