Like a savage underneath...

Winter's occupation seems to have conquered, overrun and destroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature...

this time of year i read more than i do in the summer, yet i add very few books to my "Have Read" list. summer is a time for new experiences and vacation reading. fun books and tell-alls. winter, on the other hand, is a time to get lost between the covers. a time to catch up with old acquaintances.

on these cold winter nights, as i like awake - too awake to sleep, yet wearied by the oppression of early darkness - i sift through words i've read before. i silently thank my past self for highlighting, underlining, dog-earing the pages. often i understand why a sentence meant so much to him, and the feelings return; occasionally i wonder why it deserved the ink he applied. i reassure myself that it must have at the time.


this week i picked up an old favorite, a thin paperback that i first picked up almost ten years ago for a book report. ha. book reports. didn't they seem so tedious at the time? looking back, i wish i'd been forced to write so many more.

i'd like to see what my 16-year-old self had to say about A Separate Peace back then, what his deeply philosophical young mind came up with. could he even relate to Gene? had young matthew yet encountered, and fallen in hate with, a Phineas of his own? no, not yet.


that's the beauty of re-reading books. i've said it before, and i'll commit redundancy to impress upon those of you who see no value in the re-read, just how drastically a story can change from year to year. it's as if the words rearrange themselves on the page. the pages rearrange themselves in the book.

you know how differently you take in the plot of a film if you're already aware of the ending? the way you notice that the pigeons didn't scatter as the little girl ran around them in A Beautiful Mind? well, it's not like that when you re-read a book. it's more akin to the director adding more scenes to the film, scenes that can actually alter the ending you thought you knew.

there's beauty in the re-read.

You always were a savage underneath. I always knew that only I never admitted it. But in the last few weeks... I admitted a lot to myself... It's you we happen to be talking about now. Like a savage underneath...