Not much beats sitting down outside with a book on my lap, the sun on my bare back, and a cold beverage to sip on, taking in the wind, the smell of the salty breeze and the words and thoughts of a dead genius retelling his or her tale. Reading has become my daily meditation. I'm in the middle of All the Pretty Horses and The Poisonwood Bible. Just finished The Glass Bead Game, Norweigian Wood, Jitterbug Perfume, and Leaves of Grass. I work 50+ hour weeks and these authors have provided my balance.
I'd be a different man without books, without non-fictional and fictional accounts of lives somewhat different and acutely similar to our own. Whether they are set in the future (which might now be the past [1984]), or if they document or satire a time in history, they are all relevant because they reflect the human mind and our constant struggle with our atmosphere. Sometimes the environment consists of its fellow man or fellow animals, others with society, and often it is concerned with seeking its place in this universe.
There is no such book without conflict. Every character, just as every human in this world, is searching. And as these characters struggle, we identify their problems and relate them to our own and we learn. We may not find answers, but we find lessons and stimulation that help nurture our growth.
I don't read self-help books since there is little left to imagination and the authors are generally too confident and self-assured in their approach to writing, therefore not always accepting different approaches and interpretations to their work. I prefer poetry, fiction, magical realism, historical fiction, speculative fiction, science fiction, autobiography, biography, and some non-fiction. I like writing that is interactive and requires more than brief attention from the reader. Just as a good movie should provoke more thought when the screen fades to black and the end credits start to scroll.
I present a list here of some of my favorite writers, a quote from them, and their significance in my life.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
I read 100 Years of Solitude when I came to Maui and related the magical realism aspect of life to the island I was living on. He writes the world around him, which may read like fiction to someone from another land, but reality to his. I read the first chapter four times before I continued on to the rest of the novel. His writing style and content opened a world of possibility to me. It exposed to me the sadness that pervades into the lives of old resigned men, and the extraordinary strength that the human mind possesses to impact a seemingly obstinate world. Inventions, Magic, Inevitability. He has great short stories and also reflections on writing. He shares with Bukowski the feeling that if the writing is not pouring out of you, it is not worth forcing the words onto the page.
Ernest Hemingway
"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
Blunt honest sentences fill each line of every one of Hemingway's stories. He became unofficial spokesperson of the ex-patriate writers and artists in Paris and filled many pages with his worldly adventures. I respect that he wrote whenever he found time to, in between the wars he fought in, drinking, the big game hunting in Africa, sailing in between small islands of Central America, drinking, watching the bull fighting in Spain, fishing, and more drinking. His books are filled with emotions and often difficult to read because he doesn't skirt around the emotional truths of a messed up world. The arm-wrestling episode in The Old Man and the Sea and the short story A Clean and Well-Lighted Place reflect all the emotions a reader can feel from passion to helplessness and they are written in such a simple form.
Franz Kafka
"Perhaps they are nightbirds, perhaps the first one is armed."
Here is an outline of a Kafka story in a nutshell. A man living an ordinary life wakes up one day and something extraordinary happens to him (he wakes up as a bug, is sentenced to death for a crime he didn't committ). This result is his universe unfolds into a series of unexpected, unfortuitous events and he must react in uncomfortable ways and often not find any resolution within the place or himself. This is an exaggerated aspect of life that doesn't confront us daily, but when something unusual breaches our routine existence, people tend to disregard or ignore such occurence, and Kafka believes these moments are what define us as a race. His writing challenges the reader, not just to think about what if it were me, but emotionally challenges the reader to finish a story that can be very far removed from their own reality.
Jack Kerouac
"The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy."
On the Road changed Bob Dylan's life, along with every other American whose read it. He helped start a movement, The Beats. He did this through pouring out his soul onto the page. Each finger beating on the typewriter, each suffering breath he inhaled, each endless sentence describing exactly how he felt in his soul and what he saw was translated onto the page. He found a freedom to live exactly how he pleased. Reading Jack is a release, a breath of fresh air, to share his view of the world. His poetry, Town and the City, The Subterraneans, everything he put down on the page, every word he spoke in an interview, every drunken syllable uttered is coming from a man who lived for the journey and not the destination.
Ken Kesey
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."
Many words can be said and shared about Ken Kesey as with Kerouac. He came a decade later, influenced by Kerouac, but also taking consciousness to a different level through a more direct drug influence and he became more political and extravagant. His road trips and Kool-Aid Acid tests interest me, Tom Wolfe's book is incredible, but his novel Sometimes A Great Notion stands out as his greatest contribution to this world in my mind. The characters and themes and landscape and writing are all so extraordinarily larger than life that the owner of the mind who conceived this epic must too belong to a man also larger than life. He writes of man and his conflict with nature, love, society, America and destiny, and does so in beautiful and manic prose. The reader is able to identify six different voices in the same paragraph of characters' dialogue or thought processes or song lyrics on a radio station without actually pointing out who is saying what, through his succintness in style and voice. The novel is an epic, and the author is a hero.
JD Salinger
"I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters."
Catcher in the Rye is great, but I'd rather read the Glass Family. A fictional family filled with seven precocious genius children that became more of a reality to the author than the world he withdrew from. For Esme - With Love and Squalor and Teddy are two incredible short stories that exhibit his range as a writer and his progression and knowledge of eastern thought.
And here is an excerpt from Walt Whitman's poem Song of Myself, an inspiration to a few of the above authors, and myself.
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of
the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the
earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Each of these authors is a personal hero of mine. They all had their struggles, their transcendence and their zen. Both the words they wrote and lives they lived inspire me to swim in the waters I am in now. I could write pages on each, but wanted to dedicate at least one post to them as a whole. This is part 1. Hermann Hesse, Haruki Murakami, Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Moore, Jeanette Winterson to come.
(apologies for my uninspired writing on the last few posts, I wanted to keep updating and am trying to discipline myself with deadlines, which is what kept Hunter S Thompson sane, but the quality is in this case compromised.)
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