Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you
For
most of my life, happiness meant satisfying the hunger for life’s mysteries,
discover love, pain, or understand social justice
through an astonishing amount of reading.
Born
in the same town the roman poet Ovid lived his last years and died I came to be
inspired by the written word and its power.
Ovid’s Metamorphosis were always on my desk even if for a couple of years
they made little to no sense to me.
I
also devoured Russian, British, and French literature and I did my best to read
it in its original language. I did the
same with Dante’s Divine Comedy as I was convinced, and I still am to a certain
degree that translation loses some of the subtleties the writer intended.
So
when it comes to my own writing, the influences are very transparent. Chekhov and Pushkin felt like always guiding
my quill while Zola and Flaubert helped me choose my subjects without
being concerned if a beautiful or ugly one.
The perfect use of the word, an honest and well-established rhythm, as
well as a good structure was what I absorbed from the masters and tried my best
to implement in my stories. When crafting my stories
I always tried to combine the dispassionate attitude of a scientist
with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist.
Bottom
line is that my early readings offered me a cornucopia of material and
inspiration covering all major literary movements. My own socio-cultural evolution and understanding
of the world came through books. Reading
totally opened my mind and gave me a sense of direction and in the end; my
early reading helped me find a higher purpose to my existence through my own writing.
It is one of the central ironies of my life as it is now...there're few things in life I crave more than my easy chair and reading a good book in front of the fire, but I am so busy writing and working and editing that I hardly ever get in any purely recreational reading. I have about $300 worth of books waiting that I have not cracked open. Oh, the anguish. I suppose I'll get no sympathy around here. So it goes.
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Yeah, but your work editing is making up in the grand tag of war between a good read and personal time…your literary karma is clear because you provide other people with good reads…
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Books were always my magic carpets to unknown places and times. Many of my books were like old friends. I could hop into a world, spend time with certain character by opening a book.
Like you, I also devoured various writings of philosophical thoughts, read many classics. Books teach you so much.
Some people comfort eat, me? I comfort read. It's saved my sanity more than once.
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Sia ,
I like your analogy with comfort easting-comfort reading. I might have to steal that from you
And you're right, reading kept me sane, or rather in my case , kept me harmless ...
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I only have one language, but still there were plenty of books for me to read. And read I did. For most of my life it was my reason for living. People talk about a bookless world, but I can't even imagine it. You might as well talk of an airless world.
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i agree Pat,books are the quietest and most constant of friends; A world without books would be a lonely world, without any friends....
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