Pearls

One could collect read titles like trinkets on a bracelet, or wild strawberries on a straw of grass at that time of summer when the berries are just ripe and one is just mature enough to be allowed to play with food. And so the books one has read would be strung like pearls across one’s mind. But when is a book really read?

Lately I have visions of reading, yet am struggling to find a book that could live up to them. So I leave a trail of half-read books that, over time, extends into a rope coiled around a sense of failure. Thus I decide to skip to the last page once I get sufficiently disappointed by a book, a substitute completion justified by the fact that it is impossible to remember each individual word anyway. Reading a book is suddenly little more than reading its last page and having a clue about what kind of loose ends are being tied up there. And the more such counterfeit reading I clock up, the more do I long for reading, the real thing.

I do not remember most of the books I read as a child. But I have a very clear memory of reading and it is this that I am having visions about. Then the fear: what if, just as the longing for certain places may just be a disguised longing for the time when one was there, my desire to read is desire for a time that is irrevocably past. A time when there was time -not time carved out out everyday routines, squeezes tight between tasks, appointments, commutes, and attempts to relax enough to fall asleep at night – but time pure and simple. Time without measure.