Browse among books like a crazed sheep

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

Comments

donnaanddiablo says:

October 29, 2015 at 5:07 am

Fabulous analogy…

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- David Kanigan says:
  
  October 29, 2015 at 9:20 pm
  
  It is…
  
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mimijk says:

October 29, 2015 at 5:10 am

I can’t stop…

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- David Kanigan says:
  
  October 29, 2015 at 9:20 pm
  
  So.Me.Too.
  
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ksbeth says:

October 29, 2015 at 5:33 am

perfect analogy

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Claire 'Word by Word' says:

October 29, 2015 at 7:56 am

They are like flowers in a garden, we can appreciate them again and again without ever having to pluck them from their resting place.

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- David Kanigan says:
  
  October 29, 2015 at 9:21 pm
  
  Yes Claire. Thanks it.
  
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Healing Grief says:

October 29, 2015 at 6:18 pm

There is always something more to read…..

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- David Kanigan says:
  
  October 29, 2015 at 9:21 pm
  
  Infinite.
  
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mhuckabee1 says:

October 31, 2015 at 8:45 am

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.

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- David Kanigan says:
  
  October 31, 2015 at 9:19 am
  
  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…
  
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- Christie says:
  
  September 21, 2017 at 11:15 pm
  
  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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  - David Kanigan says:
    
    September 22, 2017 at 3:16 am
    
    Cool. I too remember my excitement of getting my first library card. Thanks for the memory.
    
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