Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
When I think of the pleasure of reading, certain images pop into my mind. Tonight it is the image of someone pulling the blinds down and putting up the sign “Gone Fishing!” and then settling into a comfy chair under a good light with a fan and a cold drink and leaving the world behind to delve deep into the world of a good book.
Most people perfectly understand the sign and accept that sometimes a person has to have time to go fishing, but many people don’t understand the pleasures of reading. In fact, if I put up a sign “Gone Reading” people would probably knock on the door and say, “No way! Come out and play.”
Playing is good. Being with friends is great. And getting work, endless work, done is important. But, I believe it is important to our survival to have a chance to sit down and immerse ourselves in a book.
Books inform us, teach us, inspire us and entertain us. I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that books are riches. They are a feast. Stretching our mind is vital to staying healthy and happy.
For busy people, I ask you to put reading time into your calendar and on your list of “to-do-projects.” Reading can refresh you to face the world and its problems and tasks. Reading can give you a new perspective. It can answer questions you have. It can pull you out of the doldrums and into safe harbor. It can energize you and intrigue you. It can make you laugh or provide a cathartic effect, offering you emotional release and escape.
Books invent the world and describe it. Books open doors to places we could never go ourselves. Books open our minds and help us grow. Books show us the past and the future.
Music soothes the savage beast, but so does a good book. It also can lead us to act. I hope you can say “Gone Reading”, tonight or very soon. What book is in your hand or nearby? What book is in your mind? What storm of ideas has been unleashed? Where have you been traveling?
I have been out West in Wyoming with Joe Pickett in the Big Horn Mountains in fiction by C. J. Box. I have been learning what is in the poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius written in 50 BCE and rescued in 1417 AD by Poggio Bracciolini in The Swerve: How the World became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt.
I have been in London watching it grow into one of the greatest cities on Earth. I have been spending time in the 1770’s seeing how the American Revolution came to be and I have been in Paris in 1827.
I have been watching a poet named Joe Green and his friends save the world (the very fabric of reality) in The Chains of the Sea by Joe Green who sent it to me as a gift.
The Chains of the Sea
Page 313
And for just a moment you reach the point of ecstasy that you always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at our heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and yourself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bring Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. (Jack Kerouac)
Pages 536 and 537
Then…think of how many parts of an epic adventure we had already completed!
Call to adventure, refusal of call, answering call, obtaining supernatural aid (guide, talisman, map, companions) crossing the threshold (Inn (or brothel hopefully) on the border) tricking/defeating the threshold guardians, road of trials (confronting shadow self, meeting with Goddess, abduction/Night sea journey, dragon battle, ritual death and or dismemberment, descent into Hell, ascent from same, sparagamos) sacred Marriage Atonement to/Recognition by the Father, Apotheosis, refusal to return, return, magic flight/pursuit, recrossing the threshold.
There are so many characters from books in this tour de force and so many allusions to people. Poets I love, Keats, Byron, Lorca...a cast of hundreds...the spear of Lohengrin, the Grail, the Lone Ranger's silver bullet. Steamboats, spaceships (and of course HAL), magic buses, trains...The old poet's home, Dracula's castle, Oz...Portals that carry the defenders to every place you can imagine and beyond. And out on the diamond under the lights at Wrigley Field...a child is at bat in the last inning while God sits alone and Satan is surrounded by his minions.
It is all there.
Congrats to Joe! I have been on an epic journey across time and space.
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! In memory of a writer.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
How Iain M. Banks gave me hope
by iterology
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Kos Katalogue - Gifts for Mom (and more) HOTLIST THIS!
by Sara R
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Hill Country Ride for AIDS - more about what your money does
by anotherdemocrat
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Contemporary Fiction Views: 'The war tried to kill us in the spring'
by bookgirl
http://www.dailykos.com/...
NOTE: plf515 has book talk on Wednesday mornings early
List of mountains
http://en.wikipedia.org/...