Words, words, words.

I bumped into a new science fiction novel entitled Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess, and the title and the premise were interesting enough for me to download a sample from Amazon, which I read pretty quickly. I think I need to read this book. The basic premise seems to be (I wasn't paying close attention, so don't trust me on the details) that there's a nuclear war or nuclear accident on Earth, so some people are sent to alternate Earths. Hel(en), a young woman, arrives on an Earth where a writer she admired did not survive childhood and never wrote anything, so she finds the house he lived in and becomes determined to turn it into a museum. Yes, it is PKDickian. 

ANYway, there was a bit of an exchange between Hel and her boyfriend, Vikram, which I particularly liked:

Vikram asks Hel, "What's your biggest regret? ...Your biggest regret in life?"

And Hel answers, "The books. All the books I never read."

I have loved to read since as far back as I can remember. Literally. And I have probably read over 100 books a year every year of my life, so I think a modest estimate would be that I've read 6,000 books or so. Maybe a couple of thousand more. Or more. And I read as many as a dozen books at a time...not because I get bored with any one of them, but because I am so anxious to read new stuff that I just go ahead and start in on it. I doubt very much that a day has gone by in the past 50 years wherein I have not read at least a little bit in a book. I took a book with me when I went to the emergency room, for Pete's sake. And I have a house that is just packed full of books. I don't even know how many. Probably more than 6,000, though. There are books in every room of my house except the bathroom that the kids use. 

But every once in a while I'll think, "Words, words, words." And they make me weary, and they seem stale, flat, and unprofitable. After all...they're just black marks on paper, right? Instead of staring at them, why don't I get up off of my ass and DO something, right?

So it makes me feel better about my word obsession when I read things like Hel's response to Vikram.

This morning I was reading a few pages in Volume II of Irwin Porges's massive (1,310 pages) biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB was talking about his split with his first wife, Emma, and he said, "Love makes many sacrifices; and it dies hard, but it can be killed." And it's not the most astonishing thought, of course, but the way he said it cut through several layers of pain that lie on my heart, and I felt a moment of clarity. I often think of Clare. In fact, not a day goes by wherein I don't think of her several times. I even dream about her. And some of the thoughts and dreams are bitter or angry, but not very many. Most of them are of good times, funny things, that kind of stuff. And it's good, because it lets me remember what love felt like, because that, my friend, was a big, big love. But after thinking those thoughts or dreaming those dreams, sometimes I feel a little confused. I don't love Clare anymore. So why am I feeling these things? My friendgirl Pat tells me that she almost never thinks of her exes. But I think ERB has hit that nail's head: that love was real, it lived; but she killed it. It did take a long time to die...about 8 years, and they were long, hard, almost unendurable years...but she finally delivered a killing blow, and that was that. In the two years + since that moment, I haven't once tried to contact her by any means, haven't looked at her Facebook page, haven't Googled her name, haven't driven by her house, nada. 

So thanks, ERB. That point needed sharpening.

Guess this reading thing isn't so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable after all.