"As I have admitted, it is very difficult to tell in any given case whether a story is piercing to the unliterary reader's deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions. You cannot tell even by reading the story for yourself. Its badness proves very little. The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys. The nearest we can come to a test is by asking whether he often re-reads the same story [...] If you find that the reader of popular romance—however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances—goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry." -C.S. Lewis, "On Stories" from Essays Presented to Charles Williams

Over Christmas break, my ten-year-old brother introduced me to something I wished I'd had when I was his age, or perhaps I something I wish I'd had the imagination to discover. There's a small rectangular closet underneath the stairs leading into our basement, too small to be used for anything but storage. Still, dad carpeted and lit it, putting a light switch inside. For years, we used it to store white banana boxes filled with books—old medical school textbooks, homeschool lessons, childhood Bibles, 90's magazines, yellowing photo albums, half-filled diaries—until a severe water leak threatened them. We moved them to another room, leaving the closet-under-the-stairs empty. Eventually, extra comforters and blankets made their way in there, along with a pillow or two.