Odd coincidence: Don Quixote.

So, on my birthday that I share with a professor of Spanish literature, I was working at my library job and happened to be pulling books from the Romance Languages section of the library.

There, I came across a modern Spanish language edition of "Don Quixote", and since I'm actually reading a translation of that right now as one of my fun books I read before bed, I flipped it open to glance at the Spanish and actually managed to read a few brief bits of simple dialogue in the original Spanish (honestly, it wasn't much, it was mostly like, "Sancho friend, are you sleeping?").

But, I found that very cool, that I could read Cervantes' actual words.

It's almost like when they give bits of real Latin or Greek by famous authors in the intro textbooks of those languages, but this was so much cooler because I found the passage myself, and I'm older now and somehow that "great authors" thing appeals to me more.

Only after I did this, too, did I realize how cool it was that I did this on such an appropriate day, my co-celebrant's birthday!

I also found it very moving again, to be surrounded by all these books enclosing the words and thoughts of John of the Cross and Cervantes and everyone.

You sit there in the quiet working, and you're just surrounded by them all.

I'm not used to sitting in one place in library stacks like that, I've never really done that before, even for the other library jobs I've had in the past.