Q2:But reading saved me from despair, as it always had, for the more I read the more I realized it had always been thus, and that apparently an essential part of studying literature, whether in 1840, 1930, or 1975, was to conclude that there had once been a golden age, that it was gone.此处的be to的理解？

Q3:The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about.黑体处如何理解？