These unprecedented times have pushed me back to reading. In the age of Netflix and Quibi, it required quiet a shove from with in to get back to prose, considering my relation with books has always blown hot and cold over the years.
My relationship with books has been like that of being in love. There were times where there was obsession and times where there was regrets. And a lot of times there were tears because reading some books is like a love affair - “If you don’t take it seriously, it's not fun. But if you do, it’ll leave you in pain”.
Books have been like an old trusted friend to me. I would mostly go to them only when the chips were down. Like a true friend, they were always able to divert my attention away from the status quo and abate my pathological fear of dying alone. And sometimes, they gave a superficial bolster to the self-image or self-worth.
The power of prose is immense. And the men who possesses this power are gods in my parlance. There have been so many times that I’ve been driven to tears in envy; envious of the writers whose writing had such tour de force. I sometimes wonder that to be able to write prose like that you need to be in absolute love with the craft. The kind of engagement where you will have to bare it all and face up to who you really are. But this can be true of anything that we undertake in love.
