Minor Revelations

So I was sitting at the Italian coffee/gelato place by my place, waiting (but not really,'cuz I didn't think anyone was going to show) for some other mom's to have coffee/tea/gelato and some chat. I was reading Douglas Copeland's Hey Nostradamus and it hit me.

Why am reading books that are physically violent to me? Well not really, books are inanimate objects and incapable of any sort of autonomous actions but I digress. Perhaps saying that "it occurred to me" would make more sense.

What occurred to me? Well every once in a while I have a moment of the most deepest and profoundest thought. Mostly these moments revolve around bologna sandwiches and the addictive nature of chocolate and caffeine. Sometimes these moments center around the most paranoid of fears and other times they are actual philosophical revelations, that stop me in my tracks for a while to think about my deeply flawed personality or is that my intense genius?


Well since I'm no genius and I'm pretty sure that my personality isn't anymore flawed than anybody else that I know of; that last statement isn't very apt either. To get to the point; I stop what I'm doing and stare off into space while I investigate the thought, trace it back to it's origin and either discard it or tuck it away for further inspection.

What was this profound thought about? bologna? chocolate? Not this time. A few posts ago I mentioned my vivid dreams. Sometimes they are so vivid that I have had moments where I've had to stop and wonder if some strange thing I'm remembering actually happened or if that was something I had dreamed about.

The same thing happens when I read. In grade three I was punished for not hearing the teacher announce the end of reading time. I was so absorbed in the book I was reading (I'm thinking it was Tolkien, but not Lord of the Rings) that I hadn't heard the teacher, hadn't noticed everyone taking out their math books and missed most of the lesson. It was an honest mistake. that teacher didn't like me for some reason, not sure why because I remember really liking her. But I digress, back to the subject.

I get so involved with the narrative, the plot, the characters in some books that I start to identify with them. In a not so much crazy out of touch with reality kind of way; these things become a part of my personal experience. I sometimes have to stop myself in a situation and separate my personal experience from those which only happened between the covers of a book.

In the case of literature, I suppose I am the ideal reader. We all hear the literacy propaganda (and I'm not saying it's bad propaganda) talking about how reading can transport you to new worlds and ideas. I'd like to think that everyone feels that way when they read a good book but I wonder if anyone has the same experience of reality twisting with narrative that I do.

As for my brilliant insight? You didn't think I was going to share my findings on the meaning of life, the universe and everything else did you? The Answer is 42, the question still remains a mystery