The smell of coffee hovered heavily in the air as I devoured urgently the words that filled the sweat stained pages of a four hundred page novel. “Words, words, words”. The words of Hamlet resonated heavily as I blindly absorbed words, hardly “chewing” or “digesting”. Is that what reading is supposed to be? Has reading completely lost its meaning or purpose to me? Is it all about encountering a bunch of famous writers’ names and devouring the necessary must read classics, hardly experiencing the beauty of what their truths offered to me.
I stared blankly into the sea of books expanding before me when I hardly looked into the treasures offered by its vast depths, the little pearls, starfish and jellyfish, the coral reefs and seaweeds. I ran like a madwoman, guzzling coffee and reading obsessively but never with pleasure. I never got to enjoy each morsel of words but rather gulped and swallowed the plethora of words at one go.
When did I come across this hard truth? I wondered this to myself. I confronted this stumbling block when all of us were confined within the four walls of our houses as a result of the pandemic, and attempted to make use of our time productively. I asked this to myself as I made long lists of the so-called who are necessarily to be read. Isn’t it necessary to acknowledge the unacknowledged voices from the remotest corners or most importantly celebrate the unsung voices that have remained bleak and blighted out of human existence?
I have always admired comics and graphic novels whose pictures never ceased to amaze me. Or the dazzling magical fairy lands that enabled me to make quick escapades into never lands, far away from reality. However, I tended to prefer fat volumes of classics or rather, gave more precedence to them, due to their legitimacy rather than their beauty or pearls of wisdom. Now that is seriously problematic since it meant discarding the beauty of other unexplored realms or genres.
Moreover, I was mistaken by the ginormous dusted appeal of those classical volumes, preferring them in my quest to understand the meaning of life when I hardly “lived” my life. I never enjoyed the pleasures and fleeting nature of youth, abandoning them over libraries and silence, secretly conspiring with them. Now I am not negating the pleasure that reading unraveled to me, but I rather realised that I missed out on an otherwise outside world and its while and pleasures, its small and simple joys for grand meanings of life.
What does reading exactly mean to me? It means to breathe life into otherwise hollow and powerless words that existed on thin pages. It means that I get to breathe life or become part of a process of creation. Does that make me powerful in my otherwise small universe that I have constructed out of thin air. Maybe…I could breathe flesh and blood into an otherwise powerless entity that exists in a vacuum. I feel alive in doing so.
Me, a recluse who hardly spoke or a submissive, meek person who felt caged within societal pressures. I felt alive, the adrenaline coursing through my veins, when I constructed fictitious figures, or found secret hidden meanings that were otherwise undiscovered by anyone. I explored untold and sometimes painful truths when I saw myself in those fictitious characters. I felt pain and cried aloud, when I hardly cried or expressed myself in a healthy fashion in reality. I laughed with tears rolling down my cheeks, when I hardly laughed in my otherwise sordid life.
I learnt to go slow and steady in my voyage of reading. Perhaps this is what I wrestled with in my life. I speedily went through the process of growing up when in reality I forgot to realise what it felt like to grow up, the learning moments, the rights and the wrongs that came along with them. Not to devour but to cherish each morsel, to live in the moment rather than become anxious about how or how it would not benefit me in the long run. Not to calculate the pros or cons but to just breathe and let the moment conquer me. While we hassle in the huzzle and buzzle of our fast and fleeting lives, it is necessary to go slow, to breathe once in a while and most importantly, to experience what it is like to breathe.
