The sadness of reading
He wished he hated reading.
He wished he had never latched on that Stillsuite, that cape, those faded fatigues. Never pirouetted with the devil, defenestrated another’s lover, earned power through names. Never starved for that orphan. Never tasted one's flight.
There was nothing at risk. Just one word following another until the mirage closed shut.
He tried to stop. More times than he could count. Read how to do so. But the Sirens kept weeping. Grief in reflection, nature in cruelty, beauty in lies bled through an abyss of blank pages.
So he drowned the books. Watched their pages blossom, their spines dissolve. He held them down and the sea babbled with wraiths.
Then he ran. Created his stories. Dilettante, banker, lost soul. Those around him played their parts as rascals and lovers and friends.
Constellations shifting year over year.
But the new stories never stopped. Every question an endless well of why, whipped by time into truths never completed. Cause and effect beaten by butterfly wings.
He wished he had never known such simplicity.
"Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled-the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?" Moby Dick
"True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing." The Importance of Being Ernest
"Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality" Pale Fire
"The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections." A history of the world in 10.5 Chapters
"We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained... essentially we are creatures of the spirit." A single Man
"It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing." A Girls Story
