Journal 36: What's a Book?

     I was unable to get the meaning when I first saw this quotation. After I heard the explanation of it, I suddenly realized the deeper meaning of it. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quotation, he means that a book is everything for you if you know what is in it; a book is nothing for you if you don’t know anything from it. As the example we discussed during the class, a Korean book might not mean anything to anyone in our class because no one in this class understand Korean. Although it is a good book, it does mean nothing to people who don’t understand Korean. To me, there is another explanation to explain this quotation. There is a book written in English and you understand English very well, but you won’t get anything if you are not interested in it. For example, I have a book which teaches us how to make Italian food, but I am not interested in cooking at all. Therefore, this book is nothing though I am able to read each word of it. There are many things in our lives, some are meant a lot to us but some are not, figuring our which is your “real book” is very important.