finishing and starting up

[last year, in the coat check, he wrote:]

A book is not a worthy investment of your time and energy unless its final words send chills joyriding your nervous system. These words don't have to sum things up, they need not be eloquent metaphors or intricate symbols. They can be any words at all, as long as they are the right ones - the ones that bring the totality of the novel rushing back to wash over you as you consummate the act of completion. You read them, and all the arrhythmic stop-and-start moments you've spent exploring the world between the covers builds back up out of fragments riddled with interruptions to become a beautiful, significant whole. You don't always achieve some sort of "deeper understanding," sometimes you don't even feel fulfilled, but the words tell you that the story ended the only way it should have. The words, they wring you out like a sponge swollen with fiction and images. Only you don't drip your learnings into any sink, down any drain, they just pour back into you from different angles, arranged in different formations, like a piece of wood shattering into millions of splinters and reforming wholly renewed, identical on the outside but completely reconfigured on the inside.

The right words make it hard to put the book down. You push your forehead up against its cover and you brush the pages against your lips, letting them flutter against you as you breathe in their scent. You hold it close, then far, seeing it from all perspectives. And finally, knowing full well that there are more mysteries to be unearthed within its bindings, you slip it back on to a shelf somewhere, letting it fade back into the scenery of names and titles that pepper your room, allowing someone else and their ideas to step into the limelight.

There is time, until then, time that fills you up like a blank space, a cinematic moment of blackness when only the ghosts of the silhouettes of the seats in the theater are left drifting across your eyeballs. The words don't let you forget so quickly, move on too soon. That silhouette drags across your vision like the flash from a camera that's just taken a picture of you - and in a way every book you read that has this effect is like a picture of yourself. It takes you outside yourself, and gives you an extraneous vehicle through which to discover yourself in new ways.

Books and photography, they are a-temporal forms of art. Painting and sculpture, too. Unlike music or film, which move to the beating drums of ticking seconds, minutes and hours, books are a self-contained reality. No two people can read the book the ame way, at the same pace, lingering on the same sentences, drawing in deep breaths at all the same subtle moments. Music, movies, they morph time similarly for all spectators but a novel is timeless. it is a floating story.

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[this year, in the coat check, he wrote:]

Of course, there is the alternate thrill of cracking the spine of a brand new adventure. The inside cover of this book, The Slynx, is a shade of green that invites meadow visions in stark contrast to the barren wasteland that graces the cover, a weed-strewn Mad Max landscape that seems ready to be greeted by the rustling roll of tumbleweed at any moment. Smoggy skies on one side, leaf pigment on the other. What the hell is IN here?!