Reading.

Ah, yes. Reading.

Maybe it's a simple joy, but nothing really compares to spending some time alone with a good - er, great - book, article, journal, newspaper, magazine.

Oh yeah, and maybe a great blog. (There are a few out there.) Although I still love the feel of paper beneath my fingers when I want to read, I must confess that most of my writing is done via keyboard, my errors and inferior thoughts wiped out by the backspace button - never to be seen again (once I hit "Save" anyway).

I love to read almost as much as I love to write. I will read almost anything. Sometimes, I read something amazing.

Like Joan Didion's, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Warning: Don't pick this book up unless you're planning on staying up all night to finish it. Her flaw prose and moving story is addicting. Without being a spoiler, it details the year after her husband's sudden and tragic death in New York City, just after Christmas of 2003.

I needed to read more. Searching Amazon.com returned many titles, but I was struck and intrigued by Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

A reference to a Yeats poem, "The Second Coming."

Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays about the author's experiences living in California in the 1960s.

In he preface, she wrote, "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."

Perhaps Joan Didion and I think alike? (Ah, perhaps not, although we're both Sagittarians.) Maybe I think like Didion? No, that's just wishful thinking. Who can claim to be first to be drawn to Yeats? Or to Didion, for that matter?

All writers, perhaps, look to see a bit of themselves in someone who came before them.

When the book had first arrived, I cracked open the pages - fresh pages that have never been touched by human hands. I wondered what I could learn from this book, this prose, from this writer? There I saw she included that poem by W.B. Yeats:

The Second Coming

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"



Writing is probably the most relevant thing I do.