Greatness is not always rewarded with parades, million dollar checks or the adoration of thousands.
Greatness is sometimes honored only by the love of a few. And that doesn’t diminish it in any way.
May 2010
1. Never fuck someone you don’t admire.
2. Never fuck a friend to fuck a girl.
3. Never fuck yourself to fuck a girl.
4. It’s easy to find someone to fuck, harder to find someone to love.
5. The latter is infinitely more worthwhile.
Somewhere in our heads, if you listen hard enough, there is a voice that is the voice of Should. The voice of Should tells us how we should be doing things; how we should talk, how we should dress, how we should respond, how we should go along, how we should tolerate. And in my head, this voice tells me how I should write.
And every time we do, our real voice – our Soul’s voice – gets buried underneath sentences of sentences of what we should say, not what we want to say.
We die each time and we don’t know it.
A Writer’s Search for Meaning
And yet, in the quiet moments, our Soul’s voice finds sustenance. When we allow ourselves to simply speak our hearts – honestly, authentically – even if we break the rules of convention, our words find an audience. It is not the deft manipulation of words that resonate with us, but the touch of recognition one soul feels at listening to another soul’s voice, speaking over the voice of his shoulds. And we, when reading writing like that, aren’t as impressed by the message of the words as we are by its authenticity, because we too, yearn to express our souls like that.
Imagine having the power to traverse the multiverse, alighting onto any planet, stepping into any reality, becoming any person you want.
That’s what books are to me. For a moment in time, you are transported into another person’s mind, you see the world through their eyes, step on roads you’ve never seen, tasted foods you’ve never eaten, feel like you’ve never felt.
That’s why I love bookstores.
I can’t fly to the stars and step on alien worlds. But every book in every store is a whole new world in itself, just waiting to be explored. It is delicious flirting, the almost having of ideas, right at your fingertips, with the promise of wisdom’s love in the air; of becoming something more at the end of a book than before it.
I can’t live more than one life. But there are scores of books that, for a brief moment in time, let me get as close as I can get to doing that.