(Incidentally, until I put up the posts I wrote on my laptop while I was on vacation, this is my 1001st post on Coffee Spoons! It's not a great average over ten years, haha, but milestones are milestones.)
The other night I finished Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (which I had started the night before). I almost hate writing about literature anymore because I feel obligated to have some kind of deeply insightful academic criticism, and I'm so far out of the habit of thinking like a critic that any attempts would just be silly. But it was a lovely book. The only other Gaiman work that I've read is American Gods, which, like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, still haunts me in really beautiful ways. Gaiman weaves some kind of imaginative magic that draws you in and holds you. It's beautiful. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a short novel, and it's just about perfect. I just wish there were more of it.
It got me thinking. I used to be a risk-taking, curious reader. As a kid I would grab up any book I could get my hands on and dive right in it, happily, hungrily spending most of my time in other people's worlds. I was a weird, lonely, unhappy, imaginative, passionate child. Books were my friends. They weren't just my escape; they were my teachers, my mentors; the protagonists and I conquered the conflicts together; I came away from a story both longing to go back and better equipped for the life I returned to. I couldn't learn enough.
That adventurousness sort of evaporated in college. Majoring in English kind of killed my love of free reading for awhile; reading three novels a week will do that. But it was more than that; the hesitancy to embark on a new bookish journey has continued to the present, and has only seemed to have grown stronger in the last three years. If anyone were to ask what I'm reading it's always a book I've already read a dozen times. Something familiar and comfortable. Something safe.
I used to be braver. More curious. I think I'm shy about being moved. Since coming back to Erie almost seven years ago (seven years!), I've had to deal with some tough, all-too-real things. One of my experiences hurt and drained me so badly that I lost the ability to feel any sense of connection with anyone, myself included, for a year. Recovering from that left me...missing something. I don't stare at the stars much anymore, or notice the little daily flashes of beauty all around me. I don't waste random minutes throughout the day playing with Simon and losing myself in his adorableness. I don't spend countless hours -- or any hours -- spinning my own fiction in my head, delighted in the power of imagining. I don't write much, don't give myself over to the creative process. I don't listen to new music. I don't read new books.
No wonder I feel so stagnated. I miss the vitality I used to live in. I think I've become afraid of opening myself up, or used to closing myself in. When it comes to connecting, I still feel tired. Reaching through the pages of a book and touching a character will cost me something -- pain, sympathy, loss of self.
But I want that courage, that curiosity back. That willingness to slip into another self, see from another person's perspective, feel another person's joy and heartache, live another person's experience. I want to feel alive again.
So I'm going to read more. Taking a cue from Meg, I want to always be reading something new. Not something necessarily profound or great. Just stories. Fiction. There's lots of it out there. And lots of it on my bookshelves in my own home. Time to stop using my books to line the cases. Time to open them up and let them take me outside myself.
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