Friday, September 28, 2018

About Reading

More than anything else, I read.

I have this method in the library....I avoid authors who have written a lot of books...I like it if they've written more than one...but not if they take up a whole shelf.  Then I look for interesting titles...if the titles are good, I'll open the book and read the fly....if that's good, I'll read the back fly about the author...

There's a lot of good, readable books out there...a surprising number....a veritable corncucopia of possible reading experiences.

So, I read a lot....I generally can get through a book in a day or two...average length....2 or 3 hundred words...takes longer, obviously if the novel is longer...I do like those longish books providing they are well written....

I very often forget them right after I've read them, and enjoyed them,...and thought about them....and their various imports, so to speak....and valued them, etc.  And then I generally forget them.

I count on the idea that even though I forget them, the important part...the gist...the message...the essence, as it were..is added to my stock of general information and makes me a wiser person.

Ha ha.

Important part is, I am transported out of my current actual existence into someone else's ... the author's, presumably, or the character's that has been created....I live that life...I adopt those values, those imperatives, priorities...I have those experiences...those views...those encounters...

And my own time passes.  I get closer to my own end...and I'm glad not to have had to live through my own life during the time I'm reading, by which I mean, I think, my own thoughts, values, priorities....

It is quite hard to get my life into focus...I feel, at every stage of development, as though I've been the dupe of some illusionary ideology...some system of belief...some programing that was inculcated into me...or that I bought into in some desperation, that was totally erroneous....and the waking up to the illusion is traumatic each time...(because each has provided such comfort, such resassurance...) 

So you can imagine, reading is a great escape...fiction, of course...sometimes science fiction...

That's why the news is such a great distraction...it's not me....All this blogging...it's all about me...how boring is that???On the other hand, how would we write otherwise?  I have to write about what I know..what I experience, what it's like to be me...
That doesn't, I hope, preclude the fact that there are others out there who are not me...after all..who the hell would I be trying to communicate with if it weren't those others?  Ok ok...Jeeeez

A little tangled up there.

Perhaps a good time to sign off...


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