I lost
the ability to read.The letters floated somewhere between the paper and my eyes, hovered, hallucinatory, unreadable, and I couldn't catch them or make them form words or sentences through I knew coherency was there, below the
writhing floating
When it came back, focus, and the words stayed on the page, I read a book a day and didn't stop for 15 years.if I could just
make them sitstill.
I gluttonized on words, gorged.
I pushed myself through tome after tome, hour after hour; I let books open other books; I kept ledgers of copious notes, and dozens of journals.
I read all night. I read with urgency, as if my life depended on it. All of the classics, the 'great' books, 'great' writers, 'great' thinkers. Did I waste my youth reading Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Bacon and Shakespeare?
It's all fleeting.
But when the words stayed still, lying in neat rows on the pages, I raced through them. Who knew how long I had?
There is a deep poignancy to this piece. The reader, the writer~one who cannot absorb or spill the words rapidly enough for fear of what might be lost in a moment's hesitation.
ReplyDeleteWow~
Blessings~
you make us feel like we have lost out deeply by allowing ourselves to sleep while you gorged yourself on the imaginations of our world.
ReplyDeleteThis is a true story. In my late teens, quite seriously depressed, not sleeping ever more than a few hours a night, terrible relationship with my mother, close to 'massive breakdown' as my social worker told my Dad who then allowed me to move out on my own, I could no longer 'read.' Words floated off the page, the way they might in a dream, and were unreadable. When it came back, when words stayed on the page and were readable and comprehensible again, I did read like a mad fiend for years and years, and took copious notes, because words could have started floating again couldn't they?
ReplyDeleteNo, I've never experienced depression again, not even post-partum depression, nor have words floated above the books they were written in like that again.
Kick in the butt so many years ago? Maybe--- :-)