Diving into the Cleft with Doris Lessing

We are the " defining beings ". Binaries are the mediums of our comparisons and identity formations. There are so few books which make you wonder on the apparent condition of thought and thinking. Even rare are those stories which expose the hollow underground that is baseless and nothing of a superficiality which glorifies its own presence. As I dived into this text I recollected all the newness I had felt when I discovered for the first time that life was nothing but a shallow mass of nothingness. It takes you through the crumbling facade of anything and everything that assures belief. Words -- the ever present presence of language -- are the weakest links between the world of the eyes and the world of the mouth. Every line encounters my own sense of perceiving which suddenly is slightly transformed a moment after. Its a journey of listening rather than knowing this time. Of knowing a story without really spreading it out or talking about it later on. Something that just sticks to your skin like a scar, beautiful and marked.

.. When you open the book shelf to hunt for the next read, a million stories and desires pop in front of your eyes. I always wonder if I'll be able to select just one at that given point. When the world in front of you is impossibly large to take it all in at once, surprisingly you wish for a larger world, where in choosing that one story becomes even more retarded a procedure. But there is a way about books, its like you transform yourself to be with them. A reader is not a person who comes to every book with a million opinions and experiences, rather he is a person who empties all that and becomes almost see - through  to form a part of the story. How many times do we judge books on all the previous books we have read? Probably every single time. Is it truly possible to come to a book with a fresh heart, to make space for its unique tale in the mind without flinching it with judgments? 

The act of reading underscores the past. It is nothing but present time-travel.

Suddenly books become an unexplored array of thoughts which you never have set foot on, but want to have all of it at the same time. Every time I come across a place filled with books the urge to know each story becomes so powerful as to make me wonder where this sudden uprise and swell in my being has come from.
We are always caught up among a story. Whether ours or some stranger's. For me, what defines the art of making love with books is the simple joy of switching them randomly, pausing myself in a story and then hopping into another one, completely new, for a while as the previous one awaits my return. It sometimes takes days or months to get back to that unfinished story, but even that has a serene calm attached to its ceremonious wording. 

Take 2!

“Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.”

― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

The Gathering - Anne Enright

** It wasn't until I read the first chapter (which was a matter of five minutes) that i realized I had goose flesh. The sordid mind found its new love and then they took off. Its been a day with this book, and it has given me no reason to love or hate it. It just keeps reminding me that here in my hands, it just is. And I have to take it and read it and love it and hate it for what it just is. Sometimes the act of reading transcends the conscious, calculating, over - perfect mind to fall into a certain lethargy where everything is nothing but a simple trail of words, hanging on to each other line after line. There is no pain or pleasure or excitement for that matter, as I consciously try to keep "feeling" a certain state of elated-ness that I associate while reading any book. But there is a certain melancholy, not about the completion of the book, but about the length of its journey, the process of its story which makes me suddenly weary and impatient. Certain aspects highlight while slowly most of it fades away. You suddenly do not know why you read or even look at the book, but you still keep going. Its like the tide of time, where everything exclusive just shuts off to let every thing ordinary take its place. ** 

Take 1:

" So many books, so little time. "

- Frank Zappa

.. why I feel complete with poetry...

the sustained one note of obligatory
hope, taken in, like a virus,
before the body grows accustomed to it and it
becomes
natural again—yes breathe it in,
the interlude,
the lull.




—from “The Violinist at the Window, 1918”, Jorie Graham, Poetry, March 2008

... the act...

Reading is the stuff of the heart. It is the readiness to let go of the one world you know, and try and reach out to those countless invisible ones. Its about taking risks and diving into things that you are not sure you can keep up with or even want to.

Initially I was told about the act of choosing a book influenced by the categories of likes and dislikes. But soon, I realized that you can never choose a book, it chooses you. It sounds mystical, but there is this thing about books, they come to you in their own time, a particular time when you just don't expect them or when you've given up finding the next thing to read and face a blank heart. But then suddenly as a book approaches you and you feel the wonder and the goose flesh when your heart goes " Ah, there you are! I've been looking for you all over," or " Are you serious?," or " Finally!!," you realize that every bit of that book is going to be worth it.

I've always tried to define myself as a reader and up until recently I din't have a term. But as it goes, I suddenly find myself describing my relation with books as that of curiosity and wonder. I am a curious reader. At the very beginning, I was a nervous one and then for quite a long time a stuck-up one.On every journey, the reader encounters other readers who are either more or less passionate in comparison to themselves. I have come across readers who inspire me, those who make me wonder if they are actually in love with books and then those who've helped me take the next step of proceeding and changing my whole approach of looking at my books.

Whatever the day has been every time I open a book I can simply taste its story at the back of my mouth.

... The Journey ..

It was the school library, and I was eleven, with no sense of what books were. My world was all about dolls, cars, ninjas, hide and seek, blind man's buff and cricket with the boys. But here was a place which was something my eyes were not accustomed to. And here was my school-time best friend telling me that she was signing up to a room full of books for the span of 6th grade. I decided to join too, just for the sake of spending lunch hour with her, which formed all of my school life then.

It happened then. With my first book and then I din't know why my math grades sunk or why I was on the verge of flunking 8th grade, but it was stories and stories and only stories. The books kept coming and it never stopped. That room of books became home, my lunch hour was now only reserved for that room and a new book each day. My best friend became a secondary source of pride, the first being my new home filled with all those books which I still wanted to hangout with.

I am 22 now, and each year with every new experience, my books remain the pillars of my life. I've built worlds, cities, parks, amusement parks in them, around them, with them. I carry them in my heart, their words in my soul, constantly seeking them in whatever state I am in. My bestfriend asked me today evening, " If you had to choose between books and love, which one would you choose? " I blanked out for two seconds, and said, " I don't know, I really don't know. " But the fact was that my answer would have been totally abnormal.