After changing schools, one of the first places I went was the library. That was not unusual for me. Wherever I went, the library was where I oriented myself. It was the one room that felt the same everywhere.
The library was small and usually empty. It smelled of dust and old paper, and most days the only other person there was the librarian.
I found Homer there. The Odyssey and The Iliad. The hexameter had a beautiful rhythm, but it wasn’t entirely new to me.
I remember the summers in Belgrade when I was a child. The evenings were hot. Our street was narrow, lined with one-story houses where several families shared a single garden. We wore T-shirts and shorts; most of us were barefoot. Cars were so rare that when one appeared, we chased it down the road.
In the evenings, men came to our street to recite long epic poems about Kraljević Marko and his battles with the rebel Musa Kesedžija. The poems began at dusk and went on for hours. Sometimes the storyteller had to return the next day to finish the story.
I remember the magic of it. A man, a voice, a rhythm, and a street full of people listening, mesmerized. The phrasing was built so that you could remember long parts of the poem after hearing it just once.
The rhythm and repetition made the lines stick. It wasn’t just the beat. It was the repetition and the specific weight of the words. Today, we would say, “Muso said.” In the poem, it was always, “Says Muso.” That small shift in the wording made the story feel ancient. It made the words stay.
Musa and Marko riding towards each other on horses in full gallop. Musa, on his black stallion, threw his heavy mace so high it disappeared into the clouds, then caught it in his hands. Marko, on his white stallion Šarac, threw his mace even higher and caught it with his teeth. These images burned into me.
When I read Homer, I recognized him. It was the same steady pulse. The same long breath carrying heroes through impossible trials. Homer was doing what the men on my street had done. His tales carried me — not through argument, but through rhythm and image and the sheer pull of a story that demanded to be heard.
• • •
One day, I wandered into a section of the library I usually ignored. I found the Tao Te Ching. It was an encounter like nothing else.
Homer had overwhelmed me with beauty and force. This was the opposite—quiet, almost empty. It spoke of something that could not be named. As soon as you named a thing, it entered the ordinary world of labels and categories.
But the unnamed thing was the true reality. The named world was only sketches of reality. The real world lay beneath it, untouched by words.
That shook me to my bones. I was fourteen, and a book was telling me that everything I could see and describe was not the deepest reality. I did not fully understand it, but I felt it. And once I had felt it, I could not unfeel it. The world looked different after that. There was something fathomless behind the surface.
• • •
Later, I returned to that same section and found the Bhagavad Gita. It was stranger still.
Krishna told me I had a right to my actions, but not to their fruits. That idea lodged in me and would not leave. Then he asked for something far harder: give me your mind and your heart. At fourteen I rebelled instantly. I was not ready to surrender my identity, my ego — to agree to my own erasure. Who in their right mind would agree to such a thing?
Yet even in my resistance, a quieter voice inside me already knew: one day I would have to do exactly that. That foreknowledge was what truly frightened me. The thought that this path might be unavoidable haunted me.
Later Arjuna asked Krishna to reveal his true form. What follows is the most terrifying passage I have ever read. A light brighter than a thousand suns. Kings and warriors rushing into enormous flaming mouths like moths into a fire. Bodies caught between jagged teeth, heads crushed, the universe scorched. A god who devours worlds, licking up everything with tongues of flame.
What kind of God was this? Homer’s gods were powerful but recognizable—they were jealous and had favorites, like magnificent humans. Krishna was something entirely beyond the human. The Gita was written by people who saw the world from a place I didn’t know existed.
I had been listening to epic tales since before I could read. But the Tao Te Ching and the Gita opened windows I am still looking through, more than fifty years later.