The French writer Francoise Sagan, famous for penning 'Bonjour Tristesse' whilst still in her teens, voiced a lament familiar to passionate readers the world over when she said,"The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read." That sentiment is part of a larger soliloquy I have been saying to myself, and occasionally to others, for years. If I was granted a life span five times longer than average, I would still lack hours enough to read all that I wish to read. I should probably find myself, at the close of that nearly half a millennium, just catching up with, say, the mid-Eighteenth Century English novel. So, as it stands, with providence allowing for a run of approximately 8 decades, and subtracting the time spent actually living this life, I will fall abysmally, though gamely, short. In blunter terms: I will die trying, to the very end, to cram as much of the written word into my heart, brain and soul as possible.
In deciding to forsake reading books for the entire month of March--to reiterate, that is 31 days--I am not pushing away, however temporarily, a simple past-time that serves to fill an idle moment or two. I seldom reach for a book to stave off boredom or to kill an excess of time, nor do I read out of habit.I brush my teeth or exercise out of habit because I know, with a detached intellectualism, that those things are good for me, and therefore necessary.My bond with words is ,dually, ingrained and a conscious choice to live a specific type of life, an explanation which will be broadened upon in Part III.
Yet,I read for too many reasons to make deciphering an easy task, or a light one. It is a fiercely-tentacled thing and, in trying to untangle it, one likely to become even more tightly suctioned together. I have rarely given depth of thought to this conundrum--in fact, only since The Chef's advent into my life a few years ago have I given it any thought at all. For the next few weeks, as I let books recede into the background of my daily life, I will likely return often to this subject. For today, it is enough to say that I read mainly, beyond any hope for enlightenment or enjoyment, to form a connectedness to things, ideas and people that would otherwise be outside my world and beyond my ken.
(The photo is of a lovely painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot)
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