I just put down a twenty-year old copy of Wayne Dyer's book, "You'll See It When You Believe It!" But before I did, I noted that the book was speaking very much to me in this exact moment of my life. You could say I NEED and WANT to get the message that the author encoded some two decades ago, or more.

That's fairly astounding, don't you think? I realize great books have always seemed timeless, at least to some, if not to the many. The Bible is an obvious exemplar of long silent voices that resonate, today.

Contributing as I do to a number of online literary chat groups, the question keeps coming up: "Why write books?"

They're an endangered species, fighting against replacement by electronic pages, soaring costs, failing publishing companies, shrinking advances and royalties, and other woes.

The answer isn't, "Because there's a big buck in it!" Yes, some novels are purchased for movie production, and others catch the imagination of the reading public. But most appear briefly and in narrow contexts, and then are quietly put to death, or if you will, ushered to that purgatory known as "out of print."

But today, as I read Dr. Dyer's tome, I was reminded that books also live long lives on the shelves of our public libraries, from which I retrieved his.

I'm sure during the past two decades I picked it up before. I wasn't ready then for its message, which has been happily hibernating, perhaps in its wisdom knowing someone, somewhere would be perfectly "there in an eternal present," whenever that time arrived. Perhaps the long view, a respite from justifying corporate quarterly earnings, is what has kept the flame of literary discovery alive.

Happily, as long as there are books, vessels that can take us across oceans of time, we can climb aboard whenever we're ready.