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?
