cipher

I finished Sinclair Lewis' Main Street today; quite the solid read, really. Slow going at first, but it delivers. I fully recommend it. Having been done with that, I've returned to one of the many novels I began at one point and haven't read in months/years; in this case, Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. This is the one that won him the Nobel Lit. prize, and while Hesse is probably my favorite author of all time, this book is terribly slow. If you haven't read his Siddhartha, do; if you have, read Steppenwolf. It's probably better, really, in that it goes deeper.

Everyone (or everyone that reads, anyway) ends up finding one or two books they most identify with. My two have for years been Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Steppenwolf, the latter being a case where I essentially deliberately misread the point of the novel. That was, in a way, necessary at that time in my life. Nowadays, however, I look back on it and feel that the real point Hesse was driving at was, in fact, far closer to the course my life has taken than I could have guessed. I probably need to reread that--I'm sure it would be wonderfully cathartic.

I feel like soapboxing; something between the two books I've been reading has reminded me deeply of what I feel is the battle of our times; as it's put in Fight Club, a spiritual war. It's not easy to define, although I enjoy connecting it to "The Lord of the Rings" on metaphorical ground. Essentially, it's a matter of allowing feel to rule our lives, or of triumphing over fear (which also encompasses greed, selfishness, and, I feel, general evil). To be all that we have the potential to be; all that we are and never quite live.

Bah. I need to find something else to occupy me. This book is to dense to be fun. And Sunday evenings are exhausting.