REALITY V.S A PAPERBACK
This piece was written for Poached Mag a few years ago as a columnist. Merry Christmas!
I’d like to live within books. Drawn in by characters and happenings of a surreal place and era, you connect inexplicably with souls - fictitious or not - and immerse yourself completely in a time beyond now. I know this is true for many, and for myself - reading is like the great escape.
Differences. The impending feelings you feel within a book can be far from what it is like in real life. Differences. Where are the pockets of time which are not written in the pages? When the protagonist rubs his eyes before his first yawn in the morning, or what she feels as she is stuck on a walkway behind an old couple - that urge of beauty and irritation together, and the blankness one feels making one’s daily coffee at the pantry.
Differences.
Those tugging, quaint moments unwritten by the authors - where do they go?
Towards a place inside my head where I’d imagine their lives; I would be fabricating their facial features, imagining their fashion-senses, the way their eyes taper at the ends or the sounds of their laughter; these characters - we live in their world, we fill in the blanks where things are not explained. In some sense we become them, leading a life in an alternate universe; caught up in the clouds for far too long. Cut deep in the centre of any soul and I will see a world unknown even to the Heavens; where everyone is afraid to caper in, to walk in, to tread on ever so cautiously. In this alternate world of possibilities, our brain entails all the immense colours and sights we would never be able to capture in a lifetime. It’s beautiful to stay here. This is where the characters are borne, it is where they reside.
Sometimes there is a line where it all ends, and we are thrown back to the places which are real.
Because the real world cannot hold the ambivalence of our imagination or of the books.
The world inside us is why we look forward to the next day and the next, why we smile at little children and why we stay close to the people we love even when it is tough. But emotions cannot run the world; cannot make the city-states successful, cannot feed a million starving Africans, cannot wash the car-tires when they get dirty. Awake in the middle of the night, feet cold and eyes peering through into the dark who would you wish to see in the mirror when dawn breaks? A drawback, a scar of the past or the tiny gleams of bright futures. A degenerate, a lover, a bearer of a child’s hope. A second-guessed step, or the sound of applause. Your face seems pale in the reflection. One ponders and one decides.
One steps out of imagination, and repents for the over-expectancy of life and its permanence, with no effort. We might forget that the daily, simple things amount to great mountains of escalating brightness; if we allow it.
Keep the dreams for another night under the blankets, but live in the presence of everyday. Feeling the world can be quite daunting, it can be unimaginable with the searing words and superficial stares, ridden woes of work and school and the feigned interest we have for things and people we lack affection for. It might eat you up whole. As judgement upon judgement paves the foundation of what we deem as our society, and we watch ourselves ruthlessly tear one another apart with unsaid or said mockery online or at the lunch table, you can become afraid of all this. This living, this race. Face it anyway. Perhaps in the perfunctory will come some senseless beauty. When we frown and narrow our eyes, focused on details and living in truth, somehow the listlessness dims and the intended goals gain clarity. When the restless are asleep and your mind is spinning with ideas and you’re hard at work, find no fault in your moments, there will come your time of rest. So face it anyway.
And in the spaces and times unseen by the ones around us - just like the characters in books - we will grow to be the stories we love.
Click to viewI’d like to live within books. Drawn in by characters and happenings of a surreal place and era, you connect inexplicably with souls - fictitious or not - and immerse yourself completely in a time beyond now. I know this is true for many, and for myself - reading is like the great escape.
Differences. The impending feelings you feel within a book can be far from what it is like in real life. Differences. Where are the pockets of time which are not written in the pages? When the protagonist rubs his eyes before his first yawn in the morning, or what she feels as she is stuck on a walkway behind an old couple - that urge of beauty and irritation together, and the blankness one feels making one’s daily coffee at the pantry.
Differences.
Those tugging, quaint moments unwritten by the authors - where do they go?
Towards a place inside my head where I’d imagine their lives; I would be fabricating their facial features, imagining their fashion-senses, the way their eyes taper at the ends or the sounds of their laughter; these characters - we live in their world, we fill in the blanks where things are not explained. In some sense we become them, leading a life in an alternate universe; caught up in the clouds for far too long. Cut deep in the centre of any soul and I will see a world unknown even to the Heavens; where everyone is afraid to caper in, to walk in, to tread on ever so cautiously. In this alternate world of possibilities, our brain entails all the immense colours and sights we would never be able to capture in a lifetime. It’s beautiful to stay here. This is where the characters are borne, it is where they reside.
Sometimes there is a line where it all ends, and we are thrown back to the places which are real.
Because the real world cannot hold the ambivalence of our imagination or of the books.
The world inside us is why we look forward to the next day and the next, why we smile at little children and why we stay close to the people we love even when it is tough. But emotions cannot run the world; cannot make the city-states successful, cannot feed a million starving Africans, cannot wash the car-tires when they get dirty. Awake in the middle of the night, feet cold and eyes peering through into the dark who would you wish to see in the mirror when dawn breaks? A drawback, a scar of the past or the tiny gleams of bright futures. A degenerate, a lover, a bearer of a child’s hope. A second-guessed step, or the sound of applause. Your face seems pale in the reflection. One ponders and one decides.
One steps out of imagination, and repents for the over-expectancy of life and its permanence, with no effort. We might forget that the daily, simple things amount to great mountains of escalating brightness; if we allow it.
Keep the dreams for another night under the blankets, but live in the presence of everyday. Feeling the world can be quite daunting, it can be unimaginable with the searing words and superficial stares, ridden woes of work and school and the feigned interest we have for things and people we lack affection for. It might eat you up whole. As judgement upon judgement paves the foundation of what we deem as our society, and we watch ourselves ruthlessly tear one another apart with unsaid or said mockery online or at the lunch table, you can become afraid of all this. This living, this race. Face it anyway. Perhaps in the perfunctory will come some senseless beauty. When we frown and narrow our eyes, focused on details and living in truth, somehow the listlessness dims and the intended goals gain clarity. When the restless are asleep and your mind is spinning with ideas and you’re hard at work, find no fault in your moments, there will come your time of rest. So face it anyway.
And in the spaces and times unseen by the ones around us - just like the characters in books - we will grow to be the stories we love.