An experience in a national park is exciting. But to make sure of a safe and pleasant trip, you should remember the following rules; Always keep food in safe and sealed containers.

Leaving food in the open is an invitation to animals. It is best to keep food in closed containers in a locked car. Garbage should be treated in the same way. Be careful with the park environment while walking.

To avoid meeting with bears –make your presence known. Make loud noises, shout and sing. Be especially careful in a thick bush or along streams where water makes noises.

Bells are not suggested as the sound does not carry well.

Do not approach wild animals.

Visitors have been attacked by wild animals. They may appear tame but are wild and dangerous. Many animals run faster than you can imagine.

Always put out campfires.

They are dangerous when left unattended and can cause forest fires. Always put the campfires out completely with water before leaving the area.

Be sure to carry plenty of water.

Cool, clear stream water is not as clean as it looks! Drinking untreated water can make you ill. You’d better carry enough drinking water. If you must use water from lakes or streams, boil it for one minute.

Seat belts are required by law.

Always wear your seat belts while driving! Slow down at dawn and drive carefully when it is dark. Watch carefully at all times for people and animals on roadways.

Do not feed the wildlife.

They’ll lose their desire for natural foods and become beggars. They may bite, and/or spread disease.

The clearing of my parents’ home has made me think about the importance, even centrality of books to the house’s life and soul. The house, and our lives in it, would not have been the same without books. The force of the statement comes home to me as I see what happens when shelves are emptied. The rooms suddenly look uncomfortably bare.

I always rather took it for granted that books furnished a room. The only rooms in our house without books were the dining-room and the bathrooms. Otherwise there were books everywhere: in all the bedrooms, in the drawing-room and in the piano room which became my parents’ comfortable winter study.

I couldn’t help feeling that books were rather like people: some more formal and boring, others more entertaining; some simply for show, others with unpromising outsides but rich interiors. They had more, in fact, than furnish a room, and they were companions who will offer insights, good advice.

Now the books are being contributed (not all, to be sure, but very many), and I fear for their future, almost as if they were refugees (难民). “Habent sua fata libelli”, goes as the old Latin saying, originally written by Retentions; it meant that the fate and future of books were determined by the capability of the reader. But the meaning of the phrase has been misunderstood by time and is now associated with the physical fate of particular books, how they have passed from owner to owner. This is how Walter Benjamin read the saying when he wrote his essay “Unpacking My Library”, which analyses the extraordinarily close relationship between a collector and his or her books.

As I deal with the books –many are going to charity (慈善) shops and I hope they will find good homes–I can’t help wondering if my generation is the last that will oversee such a process. Books are disappearing, as more and more are bought in electronic form and exist only as bytes of information on E–books or other devices. Does this matter? Could books become more spiritual, as they lose their physicality?