Thought Ramblings I: Reading

Penny for my thoughts. I didn't really plan this, I was just talking to paper.

Books are like drugs. Once you start reading, you can’t stop, especially with those really good ones. While you read them, they entangle you with their vise-like grip on your mind, and when you finally tear yourself away from them, you are breathless for a few seconds, and then you start thinking “When can I start again?”

But the most dangerous thing of all is that you want more. They drag you in with such perfect doses of honeyed sentences that they keep in the whirlpool of words for as long as they want, just because of what it offers. It promises a meaningful life, encased in those words, locked up, but there and that seems a lot more than what is offered on this Earth. Soon that meaningful life, that book life becomes realer than the Earth life so much the Earth life starts to look painted. You start to imagine the brushes that paint the clouds on the blue canvas of a sky, of the leaves so carefully dotted on one by one on the delicately drawn lines of the branches of trees.

But you don’t notice the painted Earth much, because you aren’t there, walking on that sidewalk. You’re in your mind, in the book world you’ve created there. Soon, you even forget about the painting you live in, and all your eyes can see are the printed words on a page, all your hands can do is turn those pages, all your mind can think is that you want more more more.

Is there a cure to this insanity? I’ve always dreamed of one, yet still I dream of books more. I think, why not just keep reading and forget about it? Just keep inside the safe walls I put up around my book world, after all, isn’t it obviously better than that grayscale world I live in, deprived of all the meaningful colors? And I keep lying to myself just so I can keep reading; ignoring the part of my mind that screams this is madness, this hunger I have for worlds that I only live on inside my head.

I’m not sure how others cope with it, the hunger to know the meaning of life, which I know is the seed of my obsession with reading. Is it not the seed of everything we humans do? Sure, there’s survival, but us sentient beings have to have meaning, we must know everything there is to know. And so I search for it in books, and after years of n o success I still am, flipping through pages to see if any of the words give me an aha! moment. Or maybe I’m not searching for meaning in books, maybe I’m just hiding from it for some crazy reason my mind subconsciously came up with, maybe I just don’t want to know.

I only know three things right now. One is that I know books are the cause of this madness, but I don’t care because another thing I know is that books give me the hope to keep living, keep dreaming that I’ll one day know life and why he has such a sadistic sense of humor.

And the third? I also know that I’m hopelessly confused. I did say that books are like drugs, and yet they will you to keep living. They give you hope, and no hope is false no matter how impossible the thing you hope for is. So I guess reading is a strange thing scientists should study, or maybe this logic isn’t working because I’m leaving out an important part of reading, which is of course writing.

Writing and reading are actually one thing, writing is a part of reading and reading is a part of writing, just like the space-time continuum, even if they seem so different. I know is true, though, because I write when I read, I read when I write. I hear that some people say that when they read they slip into an existing character in the story and go from there, seeing as they see, hearing as they hear. That’s not what I do, though. I create a whole new person that is uniquely I and I install her in the story by whatever means possible, and that is why books have a magical pull on me. Suddenly, the other characters are my family, are my friends, and are my enemies. They become my world, such is the sweet promise of books, different from this reality, which is they crux of my problem. I am simply tired of this world, this life, so I go off and create others, which is the danger of reading and writing, the urge to create your own world.

But then again, when I write, I am reminded of this world, this life, no matter how perfect for me that world I created is. I remember my family, my friends, of how we laugh, cry, and love together. And no matter how much I laugh and cry within the book world and with my book friends, the love is fake, a rip-off of the real thing. It doesn’t give off the kind of joy I find here. Hopelessly confused, that’s right.

So let’s get back to the question of life’s meaning. Perhaps the answer to that question isn’t revealed until we die, but I can always hope to find it in this world, this life, because maybe I am not tired with life and all his lemons, maybe I ran away when my childhood ended, and now I miss the sour taste of happiness. And if I keep reading, keep writing, keep getting reminded of this world’s strange way of love, I’ll find those lemons again with my brothers and sisters and parents and friends and with the rest of humanity, I’ll find that joy again that was taken away when we were not young anymore.

But until then, I’m still as hopelessly confused as you are (and don’t you pretend you’re not boggled down by life, because we’re all humans here), but after all this rambling, maybe I’m a little closer to the answer than before, so maybe writing and reading do help and therefore are not really the drugs I labeled them in the beginning, and I know that’s a lot of maybe’s and finding the meaning of life is a bit far-fetched than I’m telling myself, but at least the hope is true. We’re all dreamers, us humans, and that I believe is a good thing.

Author's Note

I just want to know if you understand this clump of words