I just found this on my phone, written in April, 2020: <<I'm reading Faulkner for the first time. Yeah. It's amazing how many authors I've never had the time or inclination to read. I picked up second hand copies of a few of his books at a library sale, apparently undisturbed by any past reader's hands or eyes, and I've begun with "As I Lay Dying," whose language is extraordinary.
Sometimes, it strikes me that Faulkner is pulling back the facade of reality and giving us a new view, perhaps almost as modern physics does, but very differently. His characters talk like my mother's farm raised brothers used to speak, tangling up tenses, repeating things, and yet through the mangle, vivid pictures emerge.
How many ways are there of looking at the world, at your life, at the kaleidoscopic whirl of events that impinge on us? And are they all really—are we all really at bottom—immaterial energies: souls and soul surroundings with probabilistic wave functions, entangled and magical? Are we living just on the surface of hidden realities, or do we get a peek beyond now and then? I think little peeks aplenty are available, don't you? I consider myself to be a metaphysical peeping Tom. Wait! There's another one, another view through to the beyond.>>
And this note to myself reminded me of why I read: To expand my sensibilities, imagination, consciousness, and worldview, to enrich my inner life and maybe my outer one as well. I read text books, bestsellers, worstsellers, novels, collections of short stories, histories, biographies, and memoirs in search of a nugget of wisdom or perspective, which is most of wisdom anyway. Thanks for reading this.
