Years later, the book still opens to the page where he left it. The stain of the bookmark permanent now, a column of darkened paper, like a shadow, or a second margin. As if to say - this is where he stopped, this is how far he got before they took him away. Herodotus, VII.40. Pythius's son split in two.
Not that anyone cares about the specific page, or the book, or even the man who was reading it. No, it's the bookmark that matters, the letter from the famous writer that his friend thrust hastily among these pages when the knock came on the door. One more piece of a jigsaw that the great man's biographers have been putting together bit by bit. That is what they have come for, that is what they are excited to find. They will take it away, shutting the book carelessly behind them, causing the vanished reader to lose his place.
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5 comments:
But the stain is permanent. How greedily, how carelessly, one violates the privacy of a book...
Accordingly, I have renounced reading. I now content myself with gazing adoringly at books from afar. Far enough that not a word is legible.
The book itself will remember. The pages will never really come together, and if you carelessly open it, the pages will flop open to exactly where he left it. It's as if the book is saying, this is where he stopped reading, but please read on, I have a lot more things to say.
How do you come up with such stuff? Imagination!
I was a book once. On Doordarshan on a program called the Magic Lamp. I was a book chastising all sorts of book violators - the ones who lick their fingers and then turn the pages, the ones who dog-ear, the ones who cut out pages from books. I was a very pancake makeup made-up book but I was a book. In fact, the first sentence of my soliloquy went "Hello everybody, I am a book".
Your post brought back bittersweet memories of (dying leaves and dead babies and) childhood. And Stained books and Acting Careers Slowly Lost.
n!
beautiful...quite like a life that's been stopped midway.....
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