Slowing Down

One Way I Survive

Constant

If you seeing me holding forth on some topic or another, say something I love, like The Beatles or baseball, know that I love those things, dearly, but also know this: I’d almost always rather be talking about books.

Yes, buckle up. I’m going to write about books and reading yet again. I’m nothing if not predictable.

Maybe you’ve noticed it in my curiously taut slumping, or in my inability to not pontificate at length about what I was doing on, say, June 7, 2016¹. Heaven help you, you might have even dated me. Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t take much to realize I’m wound pretty goddamn right.

I think too much.

Then again, maybe I don’t².

Now

Most late evenings I sit on my bed, a book propped in front of me, my new progressive glasses³ perched on my nose, and I read. I read and I look up every now and then, up at my cement ceiling with its now familiar patterns; across the room at the boxes still not unpacked, but opened, overflowing with books, and over on the ottoman, there are two piles of books — books by Pauline Kael, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, among others; and if I turn my head to my right, I see my makeshift nightstand with a turned over cardboard box acting as an extension, and hugging all around it are three piles of books, as if they are hugging the night stand tight with their knowledge and adventure and hope.

Across the room is the one remaining bookshelf I have. Small piles of books are interspersed throughout, none of them really lined up, the exact opposite of how I used to meticulously order and reorder my movies.

I look at all of these piles of books and see my brain. Just spread out information, recollections, traumas, joys, and awe, in askew piles, teetering and beautiful. My brain is a big slobbering monster, an authoritarian of the first order, straining against itself to remind me that I am nothing, that I should do better, that what I know is inconsequential. All of this is interrupted by memories like lightning, brief and brilliant, followed by the judgment of thunder.

These memories plague me. And before I fall too deeply under their spell, I look back down at the book, feel the pressure of the world recede as I slowly sink back against my propped up pillows.

Then

When I was a kid, I sat in a friend's room and looked up at a shelf in his closet, and saw all of his books. I was overcome that he could own this many books, let alone have read them. I mentioned this to him and he said, "Oh, Kevin, you've read that many books, easily." I wasn't so sure. I did bring home stacks of books from the library, but most went unread. With allowance money, I would buy large, challenging looking books, read the first 100 pages and then set them aside.

In college, I sat up one night, inebriated, thumbing through my roommate's bookshelf, thinking how I wanted to be a reader. Yes, I had that cliche of a thought: I want to be a reader. I found a Bukowski book⁴. At the age of 20 (the age Rimbaud quit writing poetry) I decided I was a reader. I had read plenty of books before then, but they were not part of a full on thing but rather dog eared anomalies stacked up in my past.

I started reading whatever I could get my hands on.

Now

This morning, I woke up and thought about how there are sections of my body which feel a centralized exhaustion, patches of seemingly endless enervation, something that was not there just a few years ago.

I fell back asleep, and as I was waking back up, memories of beautiful and wonderful moments came to my mind, and they hurt. They ached and hurt, and I kept my eyes closed and forced myself to see them as I once saw them, and realize that they are memories and nothing more. The ache of memory is a basic pillar of life, something that both sustains and eviscerates us. I feel these things so deeply that I need something, anything, to redirect and repaint my brain.

I sat and ruminated through the emotions that spread through my body like clouds moving across the sky. For years, I have felt these things and externalized them in bright shining bursts. I try now to simply feel them and let them pass, trying hard to not show the world this internal misery. I reached for a book. I opened it, and began reading. I felt my body cool from its warmth; felt the blanket of serenity spread across my brain, blocking out the raging sun of my worries and fears — a sustaining eclipse.

Now and Then

As a child, my life — like most lives, I presume — was full of uncertainties, inconsistencies, and flashes of pain. I took on too much. I desperately tried to control each moment of my life. I was creating disconnects in my brain. Sadness and uncertainty produced open loops, moments and words left unattended, each in desperate need of unification. One of the few times I felt these loops close and resolve was when I went to the library. When I picked out books, I would feel something like a click in my brain. I knew I was going to go home and wander off with the books and unfold and discover and learn. I didn't read all of them, but you better believe I looked through each of them, cherishing the pictures, the title pages, the copyright pages, committing to memory the years they came out; the sound of the crinkling library wrapping. Closing the thicker books, I was reassured by the finality of that pop having lost myself.

Now, when I buy them, I feel that same click, that same closing of some just opened, concussive loop, surely one part of something much larger; and as I take my receipt and the books and I head for the door, I feel somehow satiated, like I have just had a meal or taken the first drink of the cocktail in front of a long night with no consequence. While just this side of hyperbolic, it feels very briefly as if there is only future, and not that kind of future that plays prominently in fear, but a future that is kind and forgiving. A meditation, a prayer.

I buy books for the same reason I eat and drink, sleep and bathe and love and accept love: because I want to keep living. It is that stark. That simple. There are real stakes here, don't be fooled. Real life and death stakes. I read because to not read would be suicide. And I buy books because not only do I want to read them, but also to peruse them at my home, to look at them when I so badly need to. Little saviors, each and every one of them.

Reading forces me to slow down. It takes hold of my emotions, thoughts, and certainty and pulls sharply on the reins, bends down and whispers, not unlovingly:

You don’t know shit.

Or

What’s the rush? All that lies at the end is death.

Or

Wisdom is garnered through the patience and humility of opening up to the world. Look out and look up — it is bright, it is bright, it is bright.

1. The last day I ate popcorn chicken. Yes, it’s true. I quit eating popcorn chicken. I know, I’m not sure how I feel about it either.

2. I already need to sit down.

3. Don’t worry, Dad, they’re not political.

4. A subject for another essay, but rest assured Bukowski’s poetry pinned me to the floor and made the world stop spinning, which in retrospect is a tad ironic, what with the drinking soaked into all of Bukowski’s writings.