“Remarkable, notable quality–
A book’s fundamental centrality
In reading’s conjunctions
Of path and state functions:
Safe travels and home’s hospitality.”
The next Twitter limerick continued the focus of National Library Week 2023; it was posted on 28 April 2023. As with the past few poems, it highlighted a specific writer’s quote that overlapped in an interesting way with a chemistry concept.
Here, the original quote was from renowned author Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life: “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
“Remarkable, notable quality– /
A book’s fundamental centrality /
In reading’s conjunctions /
Of path and state functions…”
I return often, on this website, to the metaphorical values of state and path functions. State functions, like altitude, are mathematical functions that can be evaluated simply by knowing the initial and final state of the system (the starting and ending points); path functions, like distance, require knowledge about the specific path (what’s in between).
Different aspects of these mathematical approaches are helpful to chemists in different ways. For instance, the value of the change in a state function for a cyclic process can be set equal to zero, since the initial and final states are the same. The system ends up right where it started, simplifying several resulting mathematical applications. (With respect to this last note and its overlap with this quote and poem, I also always think of another famous literary quote, G. K. Chesterton’s statement that “[t]here are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world until we come back to the same place.”)
Anna Quindlen’s quote evokes aspects of both path and state functions: celebrating the immense and wide-ranging values of books, naming their abilities to both transport and comfort. Readers take epic journeys from the comfort of their living rooms; they also bring familiar narratives along when they face challenges or travels of their own. A book accompanies the reader along their path; it also welcomes them home. Reading is a “conjunction of path and state function.”
“Safe travels and home’s hospitality.”
The last line summed up the poem’s theme, juxtaposing guided adventure and welcome return.
Chemphasis 