retreats

I find myself, these past few days, craving reading.

Now, normally, reading is a good-sized part of my life - I read at work. I read work-type stuff at home. I read for fun. I read because I want to learn stuff.

But right now - and this often happens when I'm under a lot of stress - it's almost a physical need. Like how you need to sleep when you're sick.

I've kind of put aside fiction for now - oh, I'll come back to Pickwick Papers in a couple days, I'm sure. But when I'm really distressed, I sort of like FACT. I like not having to deal with drama (even the very minor and usually comic drama of something like Pickwick Papers). I'm reading Thomas Cahill's book on Ancient Greece (and now I'm wanting to pull out the copy of Plato's "Republic" that I saved from Great Books - mainly because I liked the pretense of having Plato on my bookshelf - but now I do want to re-read it. And I want to read the copy of The Peloponnesian War that I bought in a "new exciting translation" five years ago and haven't gotten 'round to yet).

There's something oddly comforting to me about reading about events that took place thousands of years ago. And yet, kind of not.

In a way, it's kind of like reading the Pauline letters. Part of me is relieved that whatever problems my church is facing, whatever's screwed up in society, people nearly 2000 years ago faced the same problems and saw the same screwed-upped-ness. But on the other hand - it's kind of aggravating, like "We've put a man on the moon and invented flush toilets and we still treat each other in the same way that we did when we were crapping out on the street and thought the moon had rabbits in it?"

There's a quotation - I don't remember it exactly - from The Once and Future King that goes something like "the cure for sadness is to learn something." And I've found that to be true - if I can keep my mind busy trying to differentiate between the beliefs of the pre-Socratics and the Socratics and the Pythagoreans (and you wanna hear about a freaky bunch? Read about the practices of the Pythagoreans - they were this weird silence-loving non-bean-eating commune of early math geeks), I'm less likely to focus on what's happening to people around me and to ask that horrible question What's going to become of us?, which seems to crop up in my head too often these days.

I think it also helps that the last time I really thought about ancient Greece - at least in terms of the philosophers and literature - was Great Books in college, 20 years ago now. Twenty years ago my life was different, and while it was not necessarily better, there were things I worry about now that I didn't worry about then. I still believed in true love then, I still thought I would, in fact, meet my Soul Mate and live happily ever after. I thought I'd take a particular class and a dove would descend from Heaven and sit on my shoulder and I'd know that subject was what I was supposed to study for the rest of my life. I still believed that if I hit on the right combination of foods, I'd magically become slim, or at least smaller than a size 10. I was pretty naive.

But somehow, reopening that part of my mind again comforts me.

I also want to start reading a bunch of other books. I want to find the Thursday Next sequels I bought over a year ago, and re-read the original book and then the sequels. And I want to (finally) read all of the Harry Potter oeuvre.

It's funny, but I do tend to retreat into non-fiction and fantasy when I need a retreat.

Right after September 11, 2001, the only thing I could read - don't laugh - was a set of Mary Norton's "Borrowers" novels. I had recently bought the set - I belonged to a book club called "Bookspan" in those days; they had fairly reasonably priced hardbacks and it was an opt-in club, meaning you didn't have to send back some darn card or risk getting the Selection of the Month. And they reprinted a lot of the classic children's novels: I bought all the Mary Poppins books from them as well.

But anyway. The last time I had read "The Borrowers," I had been about nine. And opening those books again - not unlike learning about ancient Greece again - sort of re-opened a door in my mind, or maybe a gate, that led down a path, to who I used to be when I was nine.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I didn't regress or anything - I didn't wind up sitting on the floor with a bunch of My Little Ponies or develop a strong desire to eat Spaghetti-os while watching the Smurfs - but it was almost like I could have a glimpse, again, of who I used to be when I was nine.

(Even though I had all the same problems, all the same sadnesses, of other children, I pretty much liked who I was as a kid. I was pretty genuine, and creative, and funny, and smart. So getting to "see" that kid again comforted me).

It reminded me, I guess, that things were not always thus: that I didn't always live in a world where horrible and unexpected things could happen between your first and second class of the day.

And I guess that's what this kind-of regressive reading is doing for me - it's reminding me of a time when I, maybe, had more hope that my life was going to turn out the way I wanted it to, instead of my having to adapt myself to how it, in fact, is turning out. Where I hadn't yet seen the full panoply of crap that people do to each other. When I wasn't quite so tired and worn, before I had gray in my hair and lines around my eyes. A time back before my problems with insomnia started (I can trace my first attack of insomnia back to 1991. April 1991 to be exact). A time when I lived in a big city and it was still exciting and fun and full of possibilities and I could kind of overlook the fact that I was getting panhandled on nearly every corner and there were men who would go and pee against the wall of a CHURCH that my apartment faced (and yes, I was pretty scandalized the first time I saw that).

The thing is - it is kind of like looking at that time over a garden gate. I remember what it felt like, I remember what it was like thinking the world was just opening up and any wonderful thing could happen. But I can't quite cross that gate again; I can't quite get back there. And so my reading - even though I'm happy when I'm doing it, because my mind is diverted, when I'm thinking about it (like now, between classes), it makes me a little sad, because it's indicative of a time I won't get back.