That afternoon he returned dejected to his office and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said: “This book not only knows everything, but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong.”

It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.

“How many words does it have?” I asked. “All of them,” said my grandfather.

The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife’s head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as a writer.

• from "Living To Tell The Tale"

Note: Don't all writers - by that I refer to those that take up upon themselves that sisyphean task of transmuting the ephemera of their minds into the more solid etchings on paper - at some point fall under a dictionary as under an avalanche, and surface holding fistfuls of words?