"There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered."
Thoreau, Walden "Reading" (102)
I've written before about how much I learned from books. How to recognize love. How to reflect on my own prejudices. I certainly date my life by books.
Black Beauty
Peter Pan
Gone With the Wind
Go Ask Alice
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald and then the collection The Crack-Up
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Symposium, Plato
Purgatorio, Dante
Leviathan, Hobbes
Unless, Carol Shields (bringing me back also to Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, which broke my heart when I read it at 12)
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous
Americannah
Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
The Sight of Death, T.J. Clark
Each of these books transformed the way I see the world, my friends and family, art and literature, machines and animals. They transformed the way I think, freed me from believing that I am dependent on being one way, encouraged me to take great risks. Each deserves to be written about, and shall be soon. Of course, in the meantime, I keep looking for the next.
And, what about art? Are there pictures/sculptures/images of any kind that have changed me?
Certainly.
That's for next time.
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