While wandering from book to book, I came across this lovely passage:
“My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it, but
before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books,
before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding,
enchanting-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales.
In ‘Once upon a time,’ an ‘O’ had a rabbit running it as a treadmill,
his feet upon flowers. When the dame came, years later, for me to see
the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept
over me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a
part of the word’s beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.”
from One Writer’s Beginning by Eudora Welty