17 August 2009

Beyond Boundaries, Borders, Lines and Cultures

(written long, long ago)
*
Thanking Tridib and D.M.
*
A book-worm’s confessions…
I have to do it; it’s been on my mind for quite some time and I just feel like saying it. I must say it.

I’ve been addicting myself. I think I’m quite a hopeless addict by now. I seriously need to de-addict myself…

Yes, I’m addicted to books. To Literature. I’ve indulged myself horrendously over the past one and a half years, so much so that I don’t even remember the basic mathematics of senior school. I discovered this while preparing for my economics exam- I couldn’t even recollect the names of elementary Greek symbols, like delta and beta and so on!

Oh well!

Oh well indeed! Reading is such a pleasure. It transports you to places where you could never go in reality, to ages back in time, to places in the future, to cultures far and beyond, beyond all boundaries and barriers…

Oh well! How stereotypically conventional! Books are magical, they transport you…oh yes, you’ve read it before, haven’t you?

I bet you have. I won’t claim originality for myself here. I’m like anyother bookworm; hopelessly infatuated, caught in the trap and not quite willing to leave it.

My mind, and I think I shamelessly gratify my vanity in this, is an extraordinary mixture of a plethora of cultures, of whole new worlds which I constantly discover and re-discover. Once I’m in Troy, outside the famed Gates, witnessing Achilles’ wrath play the dance of death. Then, quite suddenly, I’m with Dr. Watson, riding up to Baskerville Hall through that dreary, foggy, excessively spooky and mysterious Moor. Very soon I’m with Everyman, journeying through the pilgrimage that is life and then with Monsieur Poirot and Captain Hastings in a quiet country manor trying to exercise those little grey cells to their level best…

I have to admit I’m suffering from severe dislocation. Most of the time I simply don’t know where I am: I might be walking in college, but I could pretty well be far away in ancient Egypt, walking in solemn state with the Pharaoh. The boundaries between fact and fiction constantly keep dissolving till reality becomes strange, unfamiliar, ‘unreal’ and the world of fiction, the world I share with sundry other folk, real and a lot more material.

Perhaps that’s insanity, a mark of my slip into lunacy, a signal that I’m beginning to loose, or perhaps have already lost, my marbles…

Or perhaps it means I am, to quote Monsieur Poirot, at the verge of true wisdom…

1 comment:

Little Anne said...

Though I am not talking to you but I couldn't help it, kindred dear thing!
":D" (The widest grin possible, that is.)