Spring Reading

I have had a recent interest in rereading some of my favorite books from high school and college.  I often list many of these books as personal top picks even though I can barely remember them, so I decided to see if I actually still cherish them.  So far, I have reacquired and reread The Stranger and Catch-22, and have begun poking around Leaves of Grass again, and have enjoyed them all as much as before.  They are not really books I would recommend to everyone, as I don't consider them universally appealing, but they still impacted me.  Most of these books I am returning too are valuable to me because they say things that simply can't be distilled, which really is the only meaningful use of the medium.  If you have ever thought life too absurd, too meaningful, too meaningless, too estranged, too intricate, but all at once, in some kind of Heisenburg-uncertainty-principal manner, then you will find that these are friendly books for the prepared mind.


As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.  Finding it so much like myself -- so like a brother really -- I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.


-----


“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”



-----


O something unprov’d! something in a trance!  
O madness amorous! O trembling!  
O to escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!  
To court destruction with taunts—with invitations!  
To ascend—to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!  
To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!  
To be lost, if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!  
With one brief hour of madness and joy.