Reading

It has been a drought, reading only for information, clicking staring at the Latest Headlines tab from the BBC online, ticking off joyless strips on comics pages under bowls of soup consumed in short breaks in small rooms, reading self-improvement tomes and taking notes, wheedling a stubborn brain to shake free a little insight. There have been instruction manuals, cookbooks and guides to filling out the necessary forms. While striding in place on an elliptical trainer, a parade of vacuous magazines offer cliches and one-page profiles of success-oriented individuals. It's wise to sanitize afterward. A fat book of philosophy by the bedside, excellent but dense as a brick, provides three or four sentences of bushwhacking each night, then the forager falls off the cliff into sleep.

Then a book on the table. Left by a visitor for someone else to read, but after driving home through the rain and eating a long chain of crackers and peanut butter and falling into the couch while the intended someone else programs a computer, the book is there. Opened randomly in the middle, picked up and entered. And it's like diving into the ocean. Doesn't matter which story, which of the seven basic plots, only that it engulfs, eclipses, and one plunges in. Time is gone, and task, and the pages devour the reader and the reader the pages, waves of narrative and motif breaking over not only the brain but the being. Several hours later, much later than advisable for tomorrow's mood, spent but unfinished, rising from the trance, a slumbering thirst has been awakened and for the moment fulfilled. A tired joy endures, of existence beyond what's seen and merely informed.