For The Love Of Reading

Another silly debate tournament essay... 


For the Love of Reading

I read because I'm lonely. Or I'm lonely because I read. Either way, I read. But I think that's it- love of reading, is love of loneliness. They're inseparable companions, maliciously and bitterly in love. Mutual in every way possible.

"Oh, but you can read a book out loud to others."

Yeah, you can. But what you experience is not what I experience. Reading a book to others is like reaching a hand to grasp to the top of an infinite bookcase, trying to get the one book you've been dying to read. Neither you, or the author will reach your audience the way that you intended. People always think what they think, or what they want or need to think. That won't change just because you use use your voice to speak rather than paper.

"Oh, but you can talk about the book to each other."

This is besides the point. To talk about reading and to read are two very different things. To talk about a book is to reflect on what has happened or will happen in whatever pages you were and will read from. Talking about reading , I think, is very much like talking about sex and actually having it. Not that I actually know the difference. What I mean is that to experience, and to reflect, are two very different things that sound the same, but never are.

"Oh but... I don't want to be lonely."

No one does. But we all are. Have you noticed how we all have our own little inner monologues going on in our heads? That inescapable voice that just has to keep saying something? The same voice that illuminates how fun it is to kiss, the same voice that ruminates how painful it is to miss... It is both a blessing and a curse being human.

The blessing is that you always have somebody to talk to: you. The curse is that the only person you ever really talk to is ultimately... yourself. No matter how carefully you listen to someone...those vibrations happen in your ear, are processed in your brain, are interpreted in your own mind... by the time you're done listening, what you got from that person is what you got from that person...and not what they were trying to give you.

This same paradox applies to reading. I read because I am lonely. Or I am lonely because I read. Either way, I read. If everything I experience is ultimately what I, and me alone, me alone in the whole wide world of billions of people, me alone, experience... then I really have only one thing left to love. Myself. And if I love myself, I love loneliness. And if I love loneliness, I love reading.

Reading is not an escape from the world, it's facing the vary nature of existing in the world head-on. The world is lonely, and so are you, sitting in your bedroom reading your book. The world is lonely, and so are you, talking to the girl you like at a party. The world is lonely, and so are you, delivering odd speeches to people who you hope might just understand.

It's all just... for the love of reading.

Atoms and Origami.

Welcome dear readers, to yet another edition of 'IGCSE English Coursework as a Substitute for Actual Blog Posts!' I'll hope you forgive me this again for not posting... I've been so horribly busy with not being busy. Then again, this statement only means anything if there's anybody reading it... or writing it? Is There Anybody Out There? 

Also, Check the blog soon for a review of 'Tseleng,' an amazing show that recently played at the Maitisong Theatre in Botswana. 

ATOMS AND ORIGAMI.

 .

“I like that we’re both made of atoms.

It means we have so much in common…

So much that we think

that we’re actually different.

It’s wonderful.”

Wonderful.

These were his infinite last words which stretched the propagation of the sound waves in the air, back and forth, forever and ever… until the ceaseless longitudinal vibrations creased out into nothing-  black and never ending silence- dead and printed words on white paper. That was all that was left of him: his face, his skin, his feelings, his heart, his blood, his mouth, his sound- all but dead and printed words on white paper.

I was beginning to think that he had planned this all out- for me to be there. To be there not with pen and paper, to be there not with a laptop- but to be there with an old school typing machine with all the click-click clanging noises. Not only that, but to think his dying words just happened to be that poetic and that meaningful… no. It could only mean that he had planned this all out. For some odd reason he knew he was going to die today, old and grey, and he wanted me to type out the final chapter of his life on an anachronism.

It would have been easier to record it all on my phone and send it as an audio message, or better yet, just get him to make the damned phone call. But no, that wasn't how my father wanted to say goodbye to my mother. It had to be layered, and it had to be on paper. And it had now needed an envelope. And I had now needed to leave the modern hospital to buy one. The hospital with its very modern and discontinuous, thin beep of a heart-rate monitor… It’s not that it was actually discontinuous: he was dead now and had gasped out the last page of his breath. It was only that my father loved contradictions. It would be far more fitting to describe the unbeating of his quiet heart as discontinuous. He was after all, discontinued.

Wonderful.

"Every single person in the Universe is their own unique arrangement of atoms..."

The photons of the sun flew violently and proudly, ignoring whatever barrier the windows pretended to provide, and the molecules in the air around us jumped heartily in response. In short, said my mother, it was a hot day. She was mirthless as she used her plastic teaspoon to gently swirl her coffee. She had turned it into a tiny black whirlpool of transferred epithet- the coffee was so saturated with sugar that it refused to be anything but latently bittersweet. One could only tell this by the curl of her lips once she had actually sipped the thing. She hadn't burnt her tongue, she just wasn't satisfied.

Bittersweet. Coffee on a hot day. A healthy old girl in a hospital. My father loves…loved contradictions. Though my mother, being my mother, had only just arrived and was thus in a position to bother with me questions I didn't want to answer. I was only happy that I didn't have to answer any questions about typewriters- I had left that in my father’s room. I had, however, managed to neatly stuff the remnants of my father into my back pocket.  Mother hadn't noticed- she had been too busy trying to find meaning in my eyes.

“I’m not too late am I?” she asked.

It was just then that an open window let in a breeze- another hearty stream of air molecules. I sighed and released a little draft of my own.

“Depends on how you define late.” I said.

My mother smiled for a second, and then took another, unsatisfying sip of her coffee.

“I don’t.” she replied.

“Neither do I.”

 It was only something to say. I still needed to go and find an envelope.

Luckily her phone rang and she gleefully began to flirt with god-knows-which-man-now as I left the waiting room. I trekked to the post office across the burning road. Each footstep actually felt hot- each lifting and stepping movement caused the constituent particles of my rubber soles to vibrate, and heat conducted from asphalt to shoe. Such was the heat on a cancerous day, completely resistant to insulation, spreading at will.

When I returned I hadn't even bothered asking my mother who had called her- it really didn’t matter. My mother and father had long been past being actually married anymore. This is not to say that they weren’t married, it is only to say that the continuation of that marriage existed only in titles on funeral cards, greetings at social gatherings, the front of my report card and in my father’s poetry… It took me some time to notice that my mother was sitting down with no signs of post-flirtation glee. The heat of her coffee had dissipated to the environment… if it had any further decrease in volume since I had left; it was probably due only to evaporation rather than actual drinking.

I came to the conclusion that someone other than myself had told my mother of my father’s current non-existence. I then took my time to pull what was left of him out of my back pocket, the dead and printed words on white paper, and neatly stuffed it in into the envelope I had just bought… Father’s dying wish. I licked the seal and did not recoil from the bitter taste as I thought I would.  I was instead intrigued by its disturbingly inappropriate after-taste, sweet and sharp, and carefully folded the envelope to a soft and gentle close.

Of course my father’s funeral casket had to be a paper masterpiece. Of course each letter of ink was filled with a countless amount of tinier than tiny black atoms. Of course my father was and had been a complex and layered little origami swan, as my mother was and is the little cute girl who had folded and unfolded him. Of course she didn't quite know what to do with him once the novelty wore off.

And of course I’ll hand over the envelope with my father’s infinite, poetic and meaningful last words to a mother who will most likely never understand them. Never understand him. All this and nothing, and all at once and never… I too, had once loved contradictions.

Wonderful.

"...and we are free to do almost anything we like with our own little bundles of God."

***

I would like to thank my cousin, Chatiwa, for being the principal inspiration behind the quote in the captions of the pictures. :D