it’s nights like this, the lonely sort of nights, when bones are aching, theatening to fire spasms into the dark of blood, that peace prevails. it creeps up silently, a stranger, acting swiftly and clumsily, like a child. sometimes it breaks for a moment only to shower you into a steep impenetrable sort of calm; a calm of chilly summer nights far away in oklahoma somewhere, where you’d lay with a straw in your mouth and long grass all around and all you’d see would be stars twinkling up above you.
reading does that to me - the book transports me, holds me, lures me and scares me back to life. i grow upwards and shrink further to the ground with every word, holding my breath as if underwater, sometimes.
it’s the ideas, the words; its everything i cannot do and wish i could. it’s the perfect storytelling of silence, the pictures projected on the retinas of the eyes without the image being there.
it’s brilliant, this magic. so brilliant that in the heart of this throbbing, vivacious city i find myself transported to the loneliest, most tranquil place on earth, as if the skyskrapers have ceased to exist, as if the traffic has stopped its clamouring and honking.
i’ve always thought that without books, life would not be worth living. it is the books we read that chart our life as dreamers, artists, schemers, men.
don’t we all know that the best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men / gang aft agley? but books, they never deviate, they never stray. forever constant, those letters on a page, changing only with the change in our perception.
