read read read read read

I need more non-fiction in my life.

Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself, anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone and whenever that happened the book began to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted.

I was walking around in a stone forest, the center of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead center, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended someone, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning.

The man who is reborn is always the same man, more and more himself with each rebirth. He is only shedding his skin each time, and with his skin his sins.

I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaptation.

This bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world. This bridge is insanity: there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge. Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am – the need I have for people, conversation, books, theater, music, cafes, drinks and so forth. It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.

But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about not doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know?

But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated in fact, that I grow more and more windows. And as the light penetrates the stone interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this trance in which I am fixed.

I read all the Sookie Stackhouse books in a week. This was not really what I had in mind.

Recently read:
Globetrotter Dogma
Prozac Nation

Currently reading:
Tropic of Cancer
a bunch of self-help books M has thrust upon me (in a nice way)

Ordered:
Crave – Sarah Kane