Browse among books like a crazed sheep

Posted on by Live & Learn

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Although I steeped myself in an incredible amount of reading material, it merely expanded the void, fattened the darkness inside the cactus. Nothing was born from there… . Despite that, I read more and more, growing endlessly fatter of soul until I could not move because of my weight. Just as the mouth takes in food, my eyes avidly devoured everything. No doubt my brain was swelling up from its morbid, chronic hunger. Even after I came to that cottage, my daily task…was to continually browse among books like a crazed sheep.

~ Kurahashi Yumiko, “Ugly Demons”

Notes: Quote: Literary Miscellany; Photo: Tilburg, Netherlands 2015 via Your Eyes Blaze Out

13 thoughts on “Browse among books like a crazed sheep”

  6. In Paris there is a fabulous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. Many writers hung out there including Hemingway and James Joyce. It has beds in it where you could stay and read and drowse and write and just live among the books. It’s an oddly comforting place.

    1. I can say that that I haven’t found a bookstore offering such comfort food for me. But I will live vicariously through your description.

      Your comment reminded me of Thoreau:

      Spent the day in Cambridge Library.

      The Library a wilderness of books. The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

      ~ Henry David Thoreau, Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

      And this by Pritchard:

      I remember sitting at a wooden desk among ordered rows of identical desks, the dominant sound that of the pages of books being turned. Warmed more by my little lamp than by the sun’s rays streaming whitely, coolly, down from high windows, I remember the sober-faced librarians, acolytes at their stations, the uniformed guards checking, with brief, polite respect, one’s pass and books. At closing time, I collected my things from my locker and exited, one among hundreds of other dark-coated, book-loving souls, into London’s rainy darkness, and headed to the station, my sketchbook sheltered inside my coat. I felt part of some great congregation of worshippers— readers, scholars, and writers with common-held faith in printed, bound knowledge. And sometimes, I thought of those thirteen million books, of all the ancient manuscripts shrouded inside the library’s vast, locked, and galleried night, and wished I could hear the low murmuring of their authors, separated and ranked, some imprisoned in locked glass cases. I regarded these books as devotional objects, as inked and holy histories, reliquaries of the human mind.

      ~ Melissa Pritchard, On Kaspar Hauser. A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, And Write (The Art of the Essay). Bellevue Literary Press (May 12, 2015)

      Thank you for sharing your thoughts…

    2. Shakespeare and Company book store – interesting…”live among the books”…/// Dave your Thoreau,and Pritchard selections came alive as I read them, so richly descriptive…what a gift it is to be able to read…and to have such a variety of others insight, available, to ponder… 🙂 /// I do remember the excitement of receiving my very own library card and wandering among the books in the children’s section at the branch library in Hollywood and at the library at school and the classroom stacks to browse through.. I remember glancing a Thor Heyerdahl’s paperback “The Voyage of The Kon-Tiki” and wishing I was a boy…since it was an adventure book…when I was older I decided girls could read adventure books, too!!! and I did read several about others adventures….

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