The Reader

Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts, about seeing clearly the way of life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of being not true to it is far, far greater."Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts, about seeing clearly the way of life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of being not true to it is far, far greater."

Profound? Yes, that is what reading offers me, gaining sweet words, analyzing their deepest meaning. Reading makes me dream, to be somebody else Helen of Troy, the disarming Guinevere, and even the kind-hearted Snow White. It gives me hidden grandiosity and bliss that only my mind can savor. Bring me to places where not everybody had the privileged to relish. Though oftentimes I succumb to manic depression but cease to become after I come across the line of J. Maxwell Coetzee in his book Youth.

"Happiness teaches one nothing. Misery, on the other hand, steels one for the future. Misery is a school for the soul. From the waters of misery one emerges at the far bank purified, strong, ready to take up again the challenges of life."

Yet for me, misery does not feel like purifying bath. On the contrary, it feels like a pool of dirty water. From each bout of misery I emerge not brighter and stronger but duller and flabbier. I am wandering to what he says, and kept on asking myself, how does it actually works the cleansing action that misery is reputed to have? Had he not swam deep enough? Will he have to swim beyond mere misery and melancholia and madness? Confusing, indeed, his words keep my brains working, analyzing and trying to figure out his identity as a writer. I could be melancholic like him or a sanguine just like anybody else. I wanted to be a writer all my life dogged and subtle.

But it turned out that after all I don't have the blessed gift, and then I must prepare to endure that, too. The immovable verdict of history the fate of being.

"Many are called but few are chosen. For every major writer or a poet a cloud of minor poets and writers like gnats barging the lion. My passion for writing ended there, and my passion for reading began. I abhor watching television while others are frolicking on them for several hours as if it were life to them."

For me, life is reading, it is here that I can dream, imagine, I can be what I wanted to be for a moment, to smell out easy sentiment from the world of fantasies to the world of politics and to choose to say nothing of their slack versifying. I could be like watermelon, soft and sweet and crimson or to be fierce and fiery like a flame.

Reading is a seduction that I cannot resist, sometimes; I make it as a food substitute. Crazy? Weird? But that is life and reading for me. The joy that I have while reading maybe as dark as the inside of a needle, that others cannot fathom. But if they will try, concentrate, truly concentrated, the blessing of inspirations will also descend upon them, the same color as my imaginations, and discover what Reading is capable...Reading is truth, it evokes intimacy and solidity.

Reading is an experience as a further stage of journey into the depths.