Reading again
Yesterday i got two books for myself. The Year of the Hare and this American Novel. I read on the bus on the way home. It was dark by the time i got onto the bus. In the darkness, buses and trains, public transport vehicles become little capsule of light that are a world of their own. Florescent lit and filled with silent, tired commuters, it is a melancholic place to be. I strain to make the world beyond the murky water stained windows. The shapes of buildings mere sketches and outlines in the night and signs go past like in Spirited Away. There is a desolation to this place beyond these bright electric rooms but somehow being in the brightness brings no comfort. It is still cold, still lost, still a place in between the place you left and home. It is still part of the journey i am making on my own.
I read the book. It gives me a little bit of hope. I enter another world. As each word follows the other, the ryhthms draw me into a different dimension. It feels strange, i have not read for such a long time on a bus, or a train. I usually go travelling with the children now and they do not permit this grown up type of reading. I used to read all the time. If it is possible, for a while back there i had lost my faith in reading. I had wondered about the pointlessness of writing. What did i do this for? Is not my narrative like another's? What should i want to read? It's all the same. But then i read something like this a realise it is not the same. Not all writing was created the same.
The prose is unforgiving and spare, like Hemmingway. The narrator and protagonist are not the same people, and yet they could be. They both share a love for observation and truth. I admire the way the author has transported me to a Finnish forest. The act of rescuing a hare is both natural and extraordinary. When someone steps out of their car, their zone of familiarity, they enter possibility, and that is what i'm doing with this book now.
Last night in the study group they were talking about life processes. How at the last stage, life must reproduce itself, or else it will die - calcify, become rigid, or if it simply replicated, then it would be like cancer and rot within. We must create in order to live. And thought how this applied to myself a bit. I am now quite stuck in a rut. The numbing idea of routine and the daily grind. How things had settled in a dull way. We needed to do something different. Something that took us out of ourselves. To reproduce, to move the soul on a bit.
Perhaps it is the winter, perhaps it is the misery of the cold weather. Perhaps it was the book last night too. But i know that i'm ready to stop maintaining, to stop holding the pattern. But how, how do i stop this?
I read the book. It gives me a little bit of hope. I enter another world. As each word follows the other, the ryhthms draw me into a different dimension. It feels strange, i have not read for such a long time on a bus, or a train. I usually go travelling with the children now and they do not permit this grown up type of reading. I used to read all the time. If it is possible, for a while back there i had lost my faith in reading. I had wondered about the pointlessness of writing. What did i do this for? Is not my narrative like another's? What should i want to read? It's all the same. But then i read something like this a realise it is not the same. Not all writing was created the same.
The prose is unforgiving and spare, like Hemmingway. The narrator and protagonist are not the same people, and yet they could be. They both share a love for observation and truth. I admire the way the author has transported me to a Finnish forest. The act of rescuing a hare is both natural and extraordinary. When someone steps out of their car, their zone of familiarity, they enter possibility, and that is what i'm doing with this book now.
Last night in the study group they were talking about life processes. How at the last stage, life must reproduce itself, or else it will die - calcify, become rigid, or if it simply replicated, then it would be like cancer and rot within. We must create in order to live. And thought how this applied to myself a bit. I am now quite stuck in a rut. The numbing idea of routine and the daily grind. How things had settled in a dull way. We needed to do something different. Something that took us out of ourselves. To reproduce, to move the soul on a bit.
Perhaps it is the winter, perhaps it is the misery of the cold weather. Perhaps it was the book last night too. But i know that i'm ready to stop maintaining, to stop holding the pattern. But how, how do i stop this?
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