Sleeping Like a Baby

Takes on a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

*****

When I was in High School I read the bible cover to cover.  

It mostly went over my head.

Before I go to sleep each night, I read.  It has varied over the years, but lately I am reading the New Testament.  Paul confuses me.  I have read the same chapter every night for four nights, trying to get the deeper meaning there.  He repeats himself over and over, and I have to believe there was more to it than that he figured the listener needed to have the message drummed into their skull.

I am also trying to read all of the classics I pretended to read in High School, and a few others that people I really respect have recommended.  I started with The Lonesome Gods, and about 50 pages in, I found myself daydreaming while reading.  I have a hard time not completing a book, and almost always will see a book through to the end, even if I hate it, but this time I decided that what made this a classic for some people didn't necessarily speak to my soul.  Not like To Kill a Mockingbird did, or Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.  Then I tried Patriots, but was utterly lost in the deep politics and history of the Founding Fathers.  I got halfway through John Adams and put it down.  I decided I should go with a book I had heard the name of often over the years.  In fact, that was the very reason I had never read it... I never have liked doing things just because everyone else liked doing them.  

Jane Eyre.

The first night was a doozy. I got four pages in and put it down, confused, and completely unable to follow the old language style used in the writing.  I felt rather stupid, frankly.  I closed the book and set it down, and suffered a little while in the darkness of my room.  Maybe, even though I really want to be a well educated, well rounded person, I haven't got the grey matter.  

What I lack in cerebral substance I generally make up for in an utter sick-to-it-ness.

Night two went better.  Way, way better.  I figured out who all the characters were and the impossibly eloquent language slowly began to congeal in my corpus callosum.

Now I do not sleep at night.  

Not like a baby, 

not before 2AM. 

Wow.  What a book.  What a writer.  What a story.

I wish I had a story to tell.  I wish I had words like that,

 that kind of passion and genius.

I may not sleep well till the book is done, and then I must remember what it did to me when I read Death of a Salesman, and could barely function for 2 weeks afterward.  Books can change who you are at your core.  Will this be that kind of book?

Oh, Miss Bronte.  

What have you done?