To Begin

 

To let the year begin with Garcia Marquez, with whatever faith and disbelief on possessions and passions I have—acquired and left, is to be condemned “of love and other demons.” What love? What demons? Why, condemned?

For this year, I promise myself to read 125 books, at least, at my own leisure; roughly a book every three days. I’ve bought and sold, lent and borrowed, books; certainly, I haven’t read all that crossed my hands. But whenever I try, hopelessly, to understand myself, I find no use for the stars nor the cards; instead, I look at the books I keep on my shelves—and see glimpses of myself on their spines.

When I love someone, I try to devour him (I have to admit: all of them were men)—his words (in translations, mostly, sadly), everything he said that I could find. I did it with Haruki Murakami. Weeks ago, I learned that his book of essays is due this July; his being alive, with its promise that he’d continue to write, is one reason I anticipate the future. I cannot die; there’s still something I await.

Murakami even had to suspend my earlier relationships with Borges, Kundera and Garcia Marquez—my first true loves. And I’ve been farther, but not astray. In the last quarter of 2007, Murakami led me to David Mitchell and I so obsessively read Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, number9dream, Black Swan Green and Ghostwritten, respectively. The last one I read, actually Mitchell’s first, made me feel insecure of a person’s first novel, for the first time. Even Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing, Kundera’s The Joke and Garcia Marquez’s In Evil Hour did not cause me as much envy and despair.

While working on Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog in the past two years, I also read the first novels of Peter Carey (Bliss), John Barth (The Floating Opera) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), among others. All of them I hated and loved at the same time.

Now I’d only like to think of numbers: 125 books in 366 days (2008 is a leap year, isn’t it?). Only 125 books in a year! Forgive my gloom, but how many years do I have—and how many really good books are there? I don’t expect many people to understand this sorrow and lustful hope. It is almost insane!: that’s the look on most people’s eyes whenever they’d see the books I had—and they hadn’t even seen everything I actually owned. Have you read all of them?

“Of course not. If I’d read them, they wouldn’t be on my shelf.” Was it Garcia Marquez or Borges who said something like that? I wish I could say that; I wish I could let go of the books I read and truly enjoyed. See, I’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude thrice and The Unbearable Lightness of Being more than five times (I practically lost count; sometimes, when I’m in the middle of another book, I’d still think of Teresa, Tomas, Franz and Sabina, and Hegel’s eternal return. I, too, was condemned to repeat myself, but it was tragic every time I did—or was the farce, the real one, in the failure to see the comic in those compulsions?), yet I can still imagine myself going through them again.

If you know me as a poet or a children’s story writer, you must have been wondering: but, why novels? Well, you see, I look at my shelves here in Nangka and ask the same question: right, why novels?

The journey has began some time ago. Only now do I acknowledge that it did. Remain with me, or adieu.

~ by ecsamar on January 2, 2008.