Theclearing of my parents' home has made me think about the importance, even cen-组卷网

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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?

【小题1】When clearing the room, the author__________.

A．realized the influence of books on his past life

B．thought of the statement his parents once made

C．felt upset to leave his parents' books behind

D．found some empty shelves left by his parents

【小题2】The underlined word “interiors” in Paragraph 3 refers to ___________.