First of all, I would like to say that I’m, obviously, still not very good about doing this blog thing. It just slips my mind at night, so I don’t update as often as I would like. Ok. There. Done.

So, I read fairly often. In fact, I compulsively buy and start reading books at least once a week. What that means, though, is that I end up being in the middle of about 700,000 different books at a time. Currently, I’m in the middle of Faust, The Dialogic Imagination, Till We Have Faces, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Wicked, Dark Tower Book 3, The Loom of Language, a couple of books I picked up at a conference last Spring, and several others that I’ve started over the years. Whenever I find one that really grabs my attention, though, I generally finish it quickly. For instance, I picked up Devil in the White City at the beginning of the summer and read it in 3 days.

I’ve fallen in love with Goethe’s Faust. I’m reading a translation by Walter Kaufman, and I have to say that I’m entranced every minute I’m reading. Here’s a little snippit:

Upon the mild light of the earthly sun
turn, bold, your back! And with undaunted daring
tear open the eternal portals
past which all creatures slink in silent dread.
The time has come to prove by deeds that mortals
have as much dignity as any god,
and not to tremble at that murky cave
where fantasy condemns itself to dwell
in agony. The passage brave
whose narrow mouth is lit by all the flames of hell;
and take this step with cheerful resolution,
though it involve the risk of utter dissolution.

How amazingly beautiful is that? I fully realize that the quote is about suicide, but the beauty lies in the description that absolutely anyone can grasp. Suicide is one of those things that most people just don’t understand, and to see such a description makes me realize that there are some people out there who really do understand.

I have had some not too happy moments in my past, and have, in the past, found myself in pretty self-destructive states–even suicidal. At this point in my life, it hasn’t really been an issue, but believe me when I say that after such an even, one never quite looks at the world the same way again. In fact, it’s the very reason I started reading outside of school again.

I find my release, my acceptance, my sense of security in literature. Literature reflects, to some degree, the culture from which it came, and because I sometimes have a tough time connecting with culture-at-large, I find that it’s much easier to connect to the culture as mirrored in books, music, movies, whatever. I look at them as concentrated culture. And through that little section of Faust I was able to see a concept, a situation, a state of being, that has transcended time and is just as gruesome today as it was in the 1800s. I see it in literature and I see it in life, and as a result, I reach catharsis.

Literature isn’t just about words or structures or interpretation. Literature is about transcending time to connect the world of the past with the world of the present and the world of the present with the world of the future, to show the people that, despite their statements about the quaintness of a given tool or course of action, the two worlds aren’t so different after all, and that’s why I love literature.