01/03/05
Every day you must say to yourself, “Today I am going to begin.”
(Jean Pierre de Caussade SJ)
Monday morning, first writing/working day of the new year. I’m at my Spruce Street writing office, having abandoned my chaotic home office with its piles of unopened mail and unpacked suitcases in favor of the serenity of my writing space and at least a glimmer of the chance to get some writing done. I like Monday mornings and new years and the possibility of changing habits and patterns for the better. Hope springs eternal and all that. I think of new beginnings and New Year’s resolutions as a particularly American impulse, but I don’t actually know whether other countries have this broad notion of the clean slate. I somehow think that dates like January 1st have magical starting powers.
Brad forwarded an email to me from Jeff Nolan, a VC blogger, who apparently cares about numerical dates also.
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/01/prime_number_da.html
Jeff writes:
“Today is 1-3-05, all prime numbers. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, but I thought about it in the shower this morning and wanted to share.”
I’m going to give writing a blog another try. I had a brief impulse last summer that disappeared into long days spent reading in Alaska. I didn’t work on my novel or do email or much of anything that I didn’t want to do. Just being, I think that’s called. Or maybe it’s called laziness. I did read an enormous amount, which was restorative and a little wild. It turns out that my answer to the “what if I won the lottery” question is that I would read incessantly. My desires aren’t radical or rebellious; they’re to return to the bookworm days of my childhood when I had to be called multiple times from my bedroom to set the table for dinner. I read a bunch of junk; but I also read deliberately from a pile of first novels and from Indian novels by Indian authors. I was tired of only seeing India through the lens of a media showing it as a good place to outsource jobs. I had some inkling that there was more going on there. After reading maybe ten of these books, I think that much of the literature is concerned primarily with domestic issues: who marries whom? A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is the biggest and best example of this. A Suitable Boy is the longest book I’ve ever read – not metaphorically, but literally. 1474 pages in a small font and narrow margins. An enormous, sprawling story of four families in early 1950’s post-colonial India, centered around a Hindu woman and a Muslim man. I have a pile of un-read Indian novels, too; which keep my other piles of books company. I’ve made peace with the reality that even if I read all day every day I still won’t have time to read everything that I’d like to. I think one of the attractions to me for the blog is that it will remember for me how much I do read, and connect me with other readers.
Happy New Year and to new beginnings..