I wasn't going to write anything until my make-believe trip around the world was offically over (I'm thinking sometime in September) but I'm in the midst of reading, "How It Ended," by Jay McInerney.
I'm on page 216 knowing I only have 115 pages left. I've already read the note on the author and the note on the type -five or six times -to stop myself from finishing the book.
I'm so afraid for it to end, I've been dragging it around the house like an old doll. I keep imagining the moment when there's nothing but that one blank page left for me to stare at. And then I quickly run my fingers over the remaining fat 115. Thank heaven. And while I hover there, three quarters of the way through this masterpiece, I am a genius who sees the world from the inside out. I'm a virtual master of the human condition. A lucid, calculating, hardened orchestrator. I'm able to manipulate my tiny characters, dress them and undress them, exposing their spoiled egos, until there's nothing at all left to the imagination. I can even rearrange them on the page, making them appear and reappear at a moment's notice until my audience is so pliable I can almost taste their longing to be released from my skillful grip. And yet I can also smell the fear that I'll abandon them, sending them back to the deafening, blinding abyss that is their real life.
And then I remember that I didn't actually write the book, I'm only reading it.
Oh well.
See you in September.
Comments