Life with Literature

Reader’s block is a disease. I hope no reader suffers from it for more than a month because for those whose joy lies on the written word, this deprivation can be absolutely lonely. Ever since I finished Saint Augustine’s Confessions around December of last year (it took me four months to finish that!), I had not had the heart to pick up another one. I flitted from one book to another, hiding each under my bed when the first couple of paragraphs could not capture my attention, until I completely gave up.

However, in light of current events, one simply could not ignore books any longer. I once savagely thought that maybe I was locked down just so I could get re-started on my unread pile.

They call me.

The saving tome was no less than Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. I was initially apprehensive because a thousand-page book just seemed too intimidating for someone who was testing the waters of reading once again. But after one chapter, I was hooked! I found myself annoyed at Scarlett plenty of times throughout the novel but I also could not help rooting for her. In between chapters, I would look up Gone with the Wind movie clips, Scarlett O’Hara’s barbecue dress, Vivien Leigh, imaginings of Tara, cotton plantations, the Confederate flag, KKK, etc. (Did you know that the last surviving cast member, Olivia de Havilland, who played Melanie Wilkes, is now over a hundred years old?)

This habit of discovering interesting bits of trivia through the wonderful world of reading brought to mind a quote from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows:

That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

When I finished the novel, however, I found myself apprehensive again. What if that was just beginner’s luck? What if it does not happen a second time? What if I could not find another book to pique my interest again? Boy, was I wrong. It seems like April is personally a month for classics because from Atlanta, I then went all the way to Colombia to witness Florentino Ariza’s lifelong pining for Fermina Daza. I don’t know about you but it didn’t work well enough for me. I finished it, all right, but I found it a little odd. Florentino Ariza was odd.

Anyway, I have nothing much to say at present – only to report that I have returned to reading and am now enjoying Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

Let me just end this post with a couple of lines from Gone with the Wind:

I was right when I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can’t ever do anything else except look back.

And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

What is broken is broken – and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

And just this one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera:

… the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

Keep sane, everybody. I mean, safe. Keep safe.