This old place is plagued by brown-outs. Any time it’s just the least bit nasty outside the power hiccups for a split-second and down go all the clocks and computers, all appliances flashing midnight. During the last bout a few hours ago I was in the middle of writing down another one of my navel-gazing, micro-epiphanies for this humble website. Losing everything I wrote didn’t bug me so much since I was writing on a subject I’ve almost got beat to death…me, and how I fit into the universe. It was specifically about fear, security, and habit. It’s not that what I was writing was bad or boring, just that I knew I didn’t have to worry about covering the same ground again later.
The thing that is bothering me is that my computer doesn’t want to boot up completely. It gets to a certain point and seems to just black out again. That’s frustrating, but I don’t have time to dick around with it now.
I’ve been reading The Prince of Tides off and on all day today. When I have a book that grabs me I will keep a vigil of reading until I finish it. I did finish it, twenty minutes ago. When I finished reading, I closed the book and sat there for a while feeling all the emotions and people I had experienced in some small way, feeling also a mixture of happiness and longing. When you get involved in a story that touches you down deep, a part of you hopes that the story and characters are somehow real because then everything can live on even after the small part you shared has been played out. Realizing that the story was created by another person diminishes its magic.
This may sound arrogant and overly exhuberant, but I think this is the book the more talented version of myself would write. So many feelings about childhood, love, and family rang true. This is the kind of book I would give to someone who wanted to understand me better. I have rarely felt so much like an author has captured so much of the person I am. In many places I felt like it would be impossible for the author to fabricate these experiences he was describing because they reminded me so perfectly of insights and experiences from my own life. So much so that I would have been able to detect the slightest hint of artifice. It’s amazing to me that powerful books have this knack of coming along just when you needed them.