“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”
Cornelia Funke
I have read some books before their time in my life. I was too young for them and for the feelings, thoughts, sounds, and people they held. I am glad for some of the books that happened to me now. I would have hated to lose one more To Kill a Mockingbird to childish oblivion. I finished reading The History of love today.
My chest aches with sadness I do not know how to get rid of. I hated being Leopold and Alma and Alma and Issac. And Bruno. I hate the suffering of characters who I am and who are my friends. One thing I should work at feeling is less. I should not let a bunch of pages fill me till the brim but two fingers with emotions, emotions so strong, I am sure I will cry if I move a little. I have rejoiced at Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy. I laughed till my sides hurt and after I finished Extremely loud & incredibly close, I cried. I curled on the floor and cried into my pillow until I had cried the guilt of a child having cheated his parent away.
I had once almost taken up a project to make photographs that stand for a book. Like a jar of pickles for the midnight’s children, but I will do this instead: maybe I will materialize the book into feelings I have felt, which is mine for life and keep it as a souvenir bought back from this trip I took. Incredibly loud & extremely close can be the anger you feel when you are so sad so deeply sad and helpless that you want to punch a wall to hit the body that harbors it. That anger at itself, and not. God of small things is probably that night when you lie in bed, so sad and aware of the sadness. Spreading into your limbs. Your cheeks. Your toes. You feel it spread and you feel like laughing at something you can’t place a finger on. But you are so sad that you must laugh. The Illicit happiness of other people is the feeling I have imagined getting if I slapped Papa or Dadi or Kaka. The shame and limitedness of yourself crunching your stomach into a ball. Biting your tongue.
Maybe the history of love is the heavy lump at the center of my heart that a doctor I once knew called my woman heart. Maybe it is that big lump of concentrated sugar, right at the center of my being, slowly passing into my throat, where I believed as a child my рдорди is. I learned when I grew up that adult humans grow to feel part happy and part sad at times, I just never knew how to explain it. I will from now analogize this book to explain this big sugar lump that makes you happy but weighs you down so hard you cannot do anything. But cry.