Quiet Day
I fell into a book yesterday and didn’t come out until dark. What an unexpected pleasure. I guess I should have suspected as much, however. It’s a science fiction book, set way in the future, about a library that deals with all the interstellar messages SETI has received. There are bits on information theory, poets, language, art, music as the expression of mathematical proofs, and life in the universe over vast time scales. All those things are right up my alley, and now that I think about it, my mind feels like a pretty cluttered alley. But that’s another topic.
Yesterday, I read. All day. Not once did I speak to a living human being. It was just me, and my book. It was bliss. I did stop occasionally to play guitar, I watched the Open Championship from St. Andrews in Scotland, I cleaned the pool, I did laundry, and took a walk. But I always came back to the book. I was reminded of my days as a youth when I escaped into books as we moved from city to city and town to town. It was a healing day of sorts. I got in touch with me. The boy who paved over the holes in his life with stories and big ideas.
I’m not finished with the book, and that’s a good thing. I hit a slow spot, which coincided with bedtime, and now I’m in no hurry to get back, because slow spots being slow spots, there’s a little less pull. But I’m in the mood these days to read every word, because I want to understand the purpose of the slow spot, and having the book there waiting means I have something to come home to, a thing to anticipate, even if it is slow. And that’s good or maybe sad. But I like having all those ideas piled up in my head as I deal with the real world, because sometimes there’s actually a clue as to what to do. And sometimes, it’s just an idea for me to carry around.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale