Puffins

It is amazing what a bowl of Puffins (aka the best cereal at Wild Oats/Whole Foods/Your organic grocer of choice) and a cup of coffee can do for me. I have been tired for the past week, for the past month, yet if I can have my mug of watered-down coffee and a heaping pile of cereal my day tends to turn out pretty well.

My lack of sleep can be largely attributed to my love/hate relationship with literature right now. I have spent the last week rereading Anthony Trollope's 900 page novel, The Way We Live Now, and also attempting to better understand post-structuralism. And yes- I love both Trollope and his ridiculously long delve into the degradation of London society and the dry, often anti-human, pursuit of deconstruction. Most of my classmates probably think I'm insane, and yes I too am worried.

But then I stop. Like I am doing right now. I stop with my bowl of Puffins and I ask myself, "Why?" Why do you care? And the answers float up quickly. I pursue literature because it pursues me. For years I have invested a small part of myself into the literary worlds of Virginia Woolf, the Bronte sisters, Nancy Drew, Toni Morrison and in return I have been courted by the ever-expanding thoughts and characters these authors and books have so carefully wrought.

I look back at years where I stayed at home, up in my room or on the couch with Noelle playing Barbies on the floor; I look back at those years and I see myself with a book, reading to myself or reading out loud. I remember my Dad coming upstairs in the evenings to read with Noelle and me, in our matching pajamas. And we would read. And we would love those moments. Today Noelle and I read more than any other people I know. She can plow through a 600 page book in a day or two; I read almost 4000 pages over Christmas break.

But in this world where life has become so fragmented, where so many people have lost connection with others, with themselves, there is something haunting about opening a book and finding that you do connect and belong. There is something haunting about muddling through a book like To the Lighthouse, and finding that Virginia Woolf's select absences of plot have allowed your heart to open up and fill the gaps. Language is the sign system that we, as humans, understand reality. And in the moments when I can't fully articulate my own pain, my own joy, I turn to someone who has delved deep into their own soul, into our collective souls, and have found the words to represent my own aching.

This quote by Michael Montaigne hangs above my computer and is juxtaposed against a picture of a woman in orange...
"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."