Reading IS sexy

If reading is dangerous, this is why- it conjures up nostalgia for things, times, and places I have no right to be nostalgic about. If it is hard enough to live in our own lifetime, what burden it is we are putting ourselves to read books, poems that come packed full of another one, two, three lifetimes worth of memories, emotions, passions, histories. And how is it that their romances seem so much more passionate, their fights actually worth dying for, and why does it always seem like the best time to be an artist was in their time and not at all my very own. It stirs up emotions and convinces you, so well, that YOU felt this. Then the guilt, of no longer feelng it. The guilt of letting it evaporate over some tens and hundreds of years we had no control of. But we should have!

Right now I am reading-
Oscar Wilde A Certain Genius by Barbara Belford (biography)
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (his prison letters to Bosie)
Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse

The ADD that makes me have at least three paintings going at once also carries over to reading (and some would say to all aspects of my life.) However, I'm convinced reading a biography, a non-fiction, and a fiction really just counts as reading one thing.




"All existance seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other."

from Narcissus and Goldmund