When I look at old textbooks there’s something poetic about them. The fact that pages turned yellow and corners were damaged, but the ideas remained. And then you look at someone’s name written at the corner and you understand that there was another person from a different country bending over this same book. It has been useful in the deepest sense. It made people know something they didn’t know before. This is a remarkable thing for a small stack of paper to have done.

Feb 12, 2026