Long live the gentleman who was divine enough to remark that ignorance is bliss. At all the times I visit a public library, I have this strange intuitive feeling that I’ll die ignoramus, without understanding the world as it was meant to be. Bookstores never make me contemplate so, reason of which I don’t know of. Maybe because I peruse copies of either writers who I read again and again or the ones I’ve read impressive reviews of. Award-winners grab my attention as well, but again I believe that art, you should muse over only to never pass judgments for your eyes, your cognition and your understanding may differ from that of the creator. Art has as many faces as the pair of eyes looking at it. For me, reading is an art not devoid of its complexities. From being a mechanical reader looking for just the narrative details to the one trying to appreciate styles, subtleties and nuances, genres in every literary or non-literary movement, I now am scared to lose my own innate cognition by getting knocked down by the zillions of thoughts accumulated over the years. I try often not to let my mind be some other’s playground, but shades of influence do find neurons.
The crisis I undergo while re-reading a book are more depressing. Each time I do so, my mind, as if by intention, will indeed find the interpretations and shades which I missed previously as if to make me feel hapless, naïve and prone to pessimism. Now I feel scared to even look at books I read long back. I fear that I no longer possess the same state of mind to interpret them the way I did before. New revelations and new subsequent thought processes will follow and previous readings will seem futile. I started writing for the fear of forgetting and losing my thoughts which are often intermittent in nature that I dread that I’ll not encounter them again. And thus, I started taking notes of them to muse around in times of solitude. Reading them in future will help me make comparisons with the thoughts of then. After all thoughts, opinions and views change faces with time, places, experiences and situations in our lives that we attribute that we cannot understand ourselves, let alone others.
The second most odious situation I face is making selections from the various genres. While reading Shakespeare in continuum, I realize that I am lagging on Dickens and Tolstoy. While I relish Marquez’s magical realism, I invite Wilde’s and Twain’s wrath. In the midst of Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus often beckons. Indian scriptures, Greek and Latin classics, Victorian works, European potpourris, Eastern mysticisms; the list never ends. The amount of thoughts accumulated in probably billions of works never ceases to intimidate you. I often bump upon books which stress on the need and art of skipping, but if skipping is an art, than I am a mental-handicap at it. I am unable to accept the fact that I in my lifetime cannot enjoy the luxury of reading one and all. I’ll indeed miss most of the art in literature. I’ll be devoid of the musings those intellects went through while authoring them
But I often dream of having a study of my own with unending shelves filled with hard-covers from all the world’s literature and thinking-movements(I doubt of any such classification though). But having born in an era of Capitalism, I am scared of devoting so much time to something which provides no monetary benefit. I get envious of the Greeks who seem to had had all the time in this world to contemplate and debate over literally everything in this world. I am at times even advised to read books pertaining to my occupation for they may actually ‘help’. No wonder we find bookstore-selves filled with guides on self-help, career, stock-market, money-management et cetera. Maybe this explains why bookstores don’t fascinate me as much as public libraries where I find books as uncared for as the gray-cells in our minds; books which remind me that the world is a complex place and no matter how many times you look at it, it appears all different at every look. Then I think: Ignorance is a bliss indeed.
©Rakesh 2011
©Rakesh 2011
