Sunday 6 December 2009

Between the Words

Dear Stranger,
        I've been sitting in the library a lot recently. The old wooden tables, the marble floors and big brass door knobs fill me with a sense of nostalgia, for someone else's past. They encourage ideas to float down out of the huge domed roof and settle on my shoulders, they conjure fake memories, as if I were a person who had sat in those chairs with a distinct purpose, scribbling away compulsively, consuming the content of the most specific books in the most detailed minutia. I remember the smirk creeping into my face at finding out new, surprising, guiding facts and the square shape of my index finger from writing for so long. Those are most definitely fake memories. I have no paper to finish, no project to research, but I do seek something, the same thing all the great writers sought, who's works fill the shelves around me in this majestic room. I seek an answer to this mortal condition, this need to stimulate my mind. It does fill me with a slight sense of contentment to know that I am surrounded by the thoughts and discoveries of so many of our greatest minds, to know that although I do not possess an answer, there is one very close to me, in a book perhaps only ten feet away, perhaps within grasping distance, it's just up to me to pick up the right book. Sometimes it's enough to sit in the middle of the room and breathe deeply in the knowledge that the air circulating in this room has brushed up against so many works of genius and enlightenment.
          I met a beautiful girl recently, she has a voice of experience. She really stares at me when I speak to her much in the same way that I stare at people, thinking perhaps that an unplanned and fleeting expression might give away more of someone's truth that they intended or more truth than they know they possess. I imagined myself with this girl, how might she change me?  Might she elevate my soul like the songs of Patti Smith? Might she haunt me they way that Dostoevsky haunts me, changing the shape and colour of the corridors of my life? Might she put me at ease and sooth me like Walt Whitman? Or might she confound me like T.S. Eliot? I imagined my hand on the back of her neck and my lips at her ear. Her piercing look disarmed me and therein lies my attraction; with just her eyes she negated the need for small talk and I believe that is some sort of answer, to be disarmed is to tell the truth.
          Perhaps I could be better served by finding this girl in books? I could have the language of experience but none of the pain. But no, I shouldn't like to cheat and I find suffering becomes me, it dusts away the ambiguities of my life and forces me on a new path. Besides there are discoveries to be made in the closeness of flesh that can only be comprehended by the individual and never fully put into words.
        

                      As Ever,

                         Stranger

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed this very much. I want to meet that girl. I have become disillusioned.

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