Last night when I wrote I was trying to escape my panic, and failed. I posted with the same nausea I felt when I started to write, and felt my lightheaded heart pounding just as fiercely. I found no comfort in the words I wrote, and felt no relief until I turned to the written word which, in retrospect, I simply should have done from the start. Reading is how I escape, and has been since I first picked up a book. My mother forced me to attend "Summer Sports" when I was nine and ten every afternoon from twelve to four so that I wouldn't sit in the library and read every day. How many parents are anxious that their children read too much? But it was an addiction for me, and still is. Just like LeVar Burton tried to explain for so many years on Reading Rainbow, every book contains a whole world you can dive into if you only try. I have lived the lives of military men, swordswomen, witches, american girls, wanderers, musicians, dragonriders, caterers, and silversmiths. I was enchanted by fiction and non-fiction alike - in third grade my favorites were the Little House books and the Young Americans series: biographies of famous americans with a special focus on their childhoods. I graduated to fiction - fantasy and mystery were the best, and I spent countless hours with The Cat Who... and Tamora Pierce. I still come back to these books time and time again - there are certain texts I find myself craving every year, and I will rush through a series of juvenile fiction in a day or weekend ignoring all other responsibility. I used to draw myself so far into the stories that my mother would speak to me and I would not respond. I wasn't simply ignoring her - I honestly didn't hear the speech. I would promise to stop when I finished the chapter but wouldn't see the break in the words - my mind would skip ahead and I would continue.
I gave up this obsession in college, mostly due to the lack of time and resources (Chicago is not particularly fond of fantasy books, and the personal libraries of my friends were suddenly 1745 miles away). I found myself immersed in Marx and Durkheim and then Tibullus and Plato which never quite held the same thrall. Perhaps I should note this is a sign that I can't hack it as a classicist, but I hold out hope. There are bits and pieces of ancient literature that still manage to transfix my mind if they can take me unawares, transport me beyond the dictionary and commentary. I can't give up on Greek and Latin until I know them well enough to be lost in a text, not surfacing even at an insistent call. If I get to that level of facility and can find no texts to be lost in, that becomes a different problem, and most likely will herald the end of my foray into academia.
My favorite writer to get lost in was Edward Abbey, for whose acquaintance I must thank my first boyfriend. He gave me one of Abbey's novels to read and I was immediately taken in by the language, the setting, the story. I suppose it is best considered historical fiction, or memoiric fiction, if such a thing exists (Mr. Frey, I suppose, can tell us about that). I had never read anything quite like it and was blown away. Today in the library I found a volume of his collected essays, a combination of articles, fictionalized truths, and outright fantasies which I am as eager to dive into as I am hesitant. I have been away from my friend Abbey for a long time, and like all friendships in suspension I cannot be sure if my memory truly matches our imminently future relationship. I am terrified that he will disappoint me, and fearful that I will be so enchanted again that I will lose my taste of other authors and be trapped in some crystal ball of diction and syntax from which I have no recourse. He writes with a passion for language that is entirely different from what one sees in someone like Joyce. Abbey is not ornate but he is poetic, he is not flowery, but has written one of the best accounts of the desperation of lost love that I have ever read. I knew from the first sentence that I would love him, just as I knew from the first page of Catcher in the Rye that I would never like anything written by Salinger. I can't explain very often what it is that seizes me about an author, about writing. I am hastily judgmental and rarely change my mind. I have given no author, in recent memory, a second chance unless I felt there was some additional value to reading the work that superseded my dislike (like Marx, who I read much to early in life). I gave up on Faulkner, Wright, Dickens, Austen after reading only one book, or short story, or page. Why return to something that brings no pleasure, no joy, no delight in the sensuous pleasure of language well-used?
I am a sentence-narcissist myself. In my attempt to self-soothe last night I first re-read everything I had posted and then turned to Reading Lolita in Teheran which I am enjoying immensely. It takes a great deal of control for me to put the book down each night and not feast on the pages of deft prose and poignant wit. But I must confess that I found my own writing about snow to be the most pacifying. When I write what I feel is a truly good sentence (and this is not terribly common, although I hope it becomes more so), I feel an attachment to it as if it were alive. I have found myself reworking academic papers so as to preserve a particular sentence that I valued about all the rest - not necessarily because of a proven point, but simply because of how it was written. This level of connection verges on obsession and is absurd, but it is the truth and it is how I look at language, particularly mine own. I have quirks with language, as I'm sure many others do - my second attempt for a site name was spackle.blogspot mostly because spackle is probably my favorite word in the English language. It's just so much fun to say, especially if you say it like a pirate. This speaks to my admiration for Margaret Mahy who writes the most fabulous chapter books for children I have read. She is absolutely fantastic and I think anyone who read her will instantly be filled with an urge to play hopscotch and skip through the halls. I particularly recommend The Librarian and the Robbers or perhaps The Robbers and the Librarian, but there are many others also.
I didn't quite mean for this to turn into a reading list - my initial feeling was to write about escaping and how we manage such a thing - but I suppose this is an example of me doing exactly that. I tried to do the same last night and simply lose myself in my own prose which was stilted enough to keep me distant. But writing this, writing tonight, every time I think of a new author I am carried into the pages of that book, my mind whirled into the fictive, or at least poetic, my eyes glaze over as I recall the elements I found so moving and I almost become recaptured by them, in spite of my obvious and current distance from them. What I write about them can never truly capture the rapture I feel on every encounter. The fictions allows me dive into the characters and worlds and live lives I've always dreamed of. The non-fictions lose me more in the words than in the described - some phrases seem like such a perfection of the language that we ought to build shrines to them and pray that they may guard our tongues to only produce speech of the same eloquence and worth. If only. If only.
Enough for now. I have lost my thread and begin to fear the minotaur.