Words without end....

It's been a while since I've jotted anything down. I have been seriously thinking about doing one of those little selfish excerpts I usually tag under "State of my Union." However, things have managed to be both hard and boring and it would hurt to revisit; even if I try to embellish events and make them pretty with big words I hunt long and hard in my Thesaurus.

So I did the second best thing, which is to go look for other people's point of view, far away from the mundane. Since I had no budget to buy me a ticket to a bonafide Irish Pub, be it in New York or in the Emerald Isle, I carpooled a trip to the local library and soon enough wound up with an assorted gang of books that range from the familiar comfort of Vampire Fiction and beautifully orchestrated collections by Neil Gaiman to the prospective challenge to read about Time Traveling Scabrous Scotsmen... which by the way its a delight of a subject to voice three times in a row, at the top of your lungs while searching in the Fiction aisle....

I'm going nowhere, except that right now my head is full of people and their stories and I need a break between books. Or perhaps is something deeper that I am trying to dismiss as trivial, I don't know. But as I browse through my books, I'm surprised and comforted  by the thought that they are not solely mine. And I guess that is the wonder about Public Libraries, that the paperback I hold in my hand has been object to someone else's subjectivity. Maybe the little book that I so loved  was tossed, mid-reading by someone else back into the library bag after been declared the crappiest piece of writing ever to soil a page... or that the slightly underlined sentence, with trembling pulse in almost faded blue ink contains an arragement of words that meant the world to someone, for the sake or misfortune of their soul.

And as I read, I internalize what a given author chose for me to see and also partake of something bigger, almost sacred. I graze the lives of others, as they will mine; all joined by an invisible thread, by that need to scape to another world.

I can't help but wonder if the person who left that trace of sultry, musky smell on my  paranormal romance book found what she or he were looking for or if the careless reader that left a chocolate imprint on the fantasy collection I'm about to attack found the stories as sweet... As I said, I don't know where I'm going, other than perhaps I felt like singing an Ode to the wonder of Libraries or the fact that unbeknownst to us we might have but a degree of separation from that stranger that across the isle.

The quote:
"My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve."- Joseph Howe