Full-circle

I've come back full circle to where I was 1-year and 7-months ago. I just finished a book The Shadow of the Wind and upon the last words it put me instantly in that old mindset. I've been missing reading for quite some time now. And, finally now, my view that reading fuels writing, has solidified. I don't know precisely what it is, but maybe it's that another story accelerates our understanding of the world, of how the cogs spin and reel. Maybe it pulls all of our own experiences into place, assigning them to someone else, giving them a name, codifying them with a beauty called prose. A character in Carlos Zafon's novel writes that "...[Reading] is an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind..." There were many places in that book where I had to set it down and squeeze my eyes shut, tight enough to fuel the intensity of my memories and push them out at the same time. A good story shows me the starkness of life, and climbing back out of one gives me a perspective into the world that I couldn't have approached in any other way.

I have that feeling again. That feeling I had in those first sweltering, Shizuoka months sitting on the rough concrete of the sea wall, staring at an ocean I knew nothing about. I would smoke a cigarette or two, not daring to throw the butts onto the beach out of a fear of her vastness, that if I did, in time she would come back to haunt me. A feeling that would grip me sitting on moonlit tatami, reading the final pages of a novel purchased in yen from the loft of a Japanese bookstore. It's a feeling that leaves me wandering in my own head, connecting new thoughts to realities, making me wonder how I can be different, how I should be different, how I've been irrevocably changed by the turnings in 6 inches of space.

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