Not too long ago, I was skimming around the internet and happened upon a blog kept by a college acquaintance of mine. We worked on the same body-image awareness literary magazine, and she is a fellow English major. I admit that she is a good writer; her first piece for the magazine wasn’t that good, but she has improved, which is really the crowning achievement. However, I was interested in what she was writing. It’s uncanny how similar people’s childhoods can be, yet there are distinctive threads that we all have that make them marginally unique. That marginality is all that is required, really.
However, she imagined herself to be a writer, a poet, a child-prodigy who had her works published when she was ten. How often did I dream the same thing? How often did I think that The Tale of Lirru-um or The Maw of the Hawk would give rise to fame and stardom like J.K. Rowling? I still have faith in my Nessa project, even though I started it when I was eighteen as part of a creative writing class, and it lies mouldering in my black Moleskine notebook with the triskele on it. I’m twenty-one already – when did that happen? How long has it been this way? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Probably figure out what I should be doing long after I should have figured it out, and then wish I could go back in time. I am a person who lives life backwards, out of sync. However, no, no, I must go forward and be happy with whatever I’m doing right now, and let the wide and wandering road take me whither it will. However, I must always keep in mind the fact that enough money to live on needs to be made and people need to be helped, which can best be done with time and/or money.
Anyway, enough digressions.
I have begun, for the very first time in my life, to read Charles Dickens. Why on earth has it taken me so long to read him? Why is he so brilliant? From the very first few pages of Hard Times, it is there, it is alive. Reality, truth, imagination, whatever you’re looking for.
'"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."'
'The Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.'
Post script because this needed to be published before it became irrelevant. (The first part was written about five days ago.)
I suppose my point in this post is to discuss how much literature can impact us, twinned with the idea that so many of our hopes and dreams are the same. However, there are those minute details that make experience unique, that make them mine or yours or hers. I don’t think I made that point very clear.
