(no subject)
Literature
I'm getting off the bus and he's there. He's not important, the idea of him is important. He's buried in his book. He hates what's around him; the do-gooders in the front of the bus - the idiot jocks in the middle of the bus - the out-of-their-mind stoners in the back of the bus. Family is shit. School is shit. Life is shit. But literature! Literature becomes his escape. Sifting desperately from page to page, from book to book, scrambling from Tolkein to Dahl to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, life has become nothing more than a retreat into a cave of all-consuming literature. This is all that is left; the escape. The cave doesn't simply block out the outside world - it blocks out the inside. Family is gone; friends are gone; school is gone; Emotions are gone. The only thing left is the experience of the book - the bitter smell of aged ink, the sound of the pages desperately flipped and yet still flipping - the painfully lackadaisical arrangement of seemingly empty words upon the page; the pile around him and inside him as a shield; his panacea. This is literature as an escape.
But then there's myself. I am not a cave-dweller. No. For me, books are not enclosed spaces I use to forget - books are passages. Through their pages - their ideas - their messages, I walk. I walk and walk. Trecking endlessly in pursuit of the other end. What is that end? Enlightenment. Beyond that murky tunnel that often seems to drown out everyone and everything beyond I set my sights. My foot plods forward as my Hope remains a valient heart ever pumping after the brain liquifies to piss. This is literature as an odyssey.
But that's my hypothetical antithesis and me; what about you?
What is literature to you and why? What can it be to others?
I'm getting off the bus and he's there. He's not important, the idea of him is important. He's buried in his book. He hates what's around him; the do-gooders in the front of the bus - the idiot jocks in the middle of the bus - the out-of-their-mind stoners in the back of the bus. Family is shit. School is shit. Life is shit. But literature! Literature becomes his escape. Sifting desperately from page to page, from book to book, scrambling from Tolkein to Dahl to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, life has become nothing more than a retreat into a cave of all-consuming literature. This is all that is left; the escape. The cave doesn't simply block out the outside world - it blocks out the inside. Family is gone; friends are gone; school is gone; Emotions are gone. The only thing left is the experience of the book - the bitter smell of aged ink, the sound of the pages desperately flipped and yet still flipping - the painfully lackadaisical arrangement of seemingly empty words upon the page; the pile around him and inside him as a shield; his panacea. This is literature as an escape.
But then there's myself. I am not a cave-dweller. No. For me, books are not enclosed spaces I use to forget - books are passages. Through their pages - their ideas - their messages, I walk. I walk and walk. Trecking endlessly in pursuit of the other end. What is that end? Enlightenment. Beyond that murky tunnel that often seems to drown out everyone and everything beyond I set my sights. My foot plods forward as my Hope remains a valient heart ever pumping after the brain liquifies to piss. This is literature as an odyssey.
But that's my hypothetical antithesis and me; what about you?
What is literature to you and why? What can it be to others?