I’m buying books again

A year ago I moved to Budapest and I stopped buying books: a reason I cannot confidently account. I rationalised by maintaining a frame of mind that my posting here in Hungary will be so temporary that my books need not be transported from Switzerland where they are –still- docking after having arrived on mainland Europe. I convinced myself that there would be absolutely no sense in buying bulky and heavy, space consuming products either that ultimately end up on a shelf touched only every once in a while. I wished for my stay here to have ended by now, that was the initial plan. A year, I’ll move back here for a year, is what I had thought to myself. Books therefore need not follow me. Books, the few I had taken here will last me till I leave.

Without books, my ideas were choking and my hand was shaking every time I sat down to write. Nothing was what wanted to surface. This scared me and left me trying less and less. I wrote seldom and what I did write, I was not happy with. A writer – as ill equipped as I am and barely a writer -cannot afford to stop reading because the experiences, the vocabulary, the ideas that I have formed in my head all need guidance and adding to. The only way to better myself is to read the mastery of those before me who truly possess the talent, the gift of creation. This is my one chance at ever being good at what I enjoy the most. If I don’t learn from the literary masters of this craft, I will never be good enough; my writings will never be good enough. But the laziness, the comfort of oblivion, the ardent desire for nothing to change, left me unmoved and uninterested in another effort to bring myself to be a better writer. The lack of motivation sparks glaciers to melt and snow to rumble like an avalanche down the slopes and drives the weak soul into a deeper and deeper state of nihilism. I turned from my books, left them waiting to be picked up for a few minutes at the end of the day. I did not dedicate time or energy or sincerity to their words. I went as far as reading pulp fiction, just to pass the time. For me – the archetype cultural snob- to let anything but classic or modern literary fiction to pass through my hands is a denouncing of the ideals I was raised to live with. There were days when I had wished I were still working in the Chelsea Cinema and had all the time in the world to read. Now I’m chained to an office where even if time undresses itself and lies naked before me, I cannot but pass on the offer and get back to wasting the opportunity with ultimately fruitless tasks that my office job requires. My books have to take what I can give: lonely hours at the end of the day.

A year has passed without stimuli for my creative channels. Today I had to break the cycle and gave in to the sweet lure of those printed pages. When I buy books, it’s the sign that I have made my peace with my situation. Buying books reveals my hunger for knowledge and for impulses that I would never get otherwise. I feel like I’ve come home to my books and that I can finally muster up the courage to take my own words and my own ideas and make a story for everyone to read. But whilst I read, I am able to postpone the daunting task set before me so that this little talent - sprinkled on me by grace and I am convinced mistake - would not be wasted any longer. First I need to learn from the great masters and then I can imitate or fabricate or learn to create an accord of the imaginative and the pages already visited. This is a hopeful time and a lustrous time when I finally let myself be swept away by the great works, when I no longer wish to hide away from the curious eyes of the world, when my sole wish is to feed off the genius of writers before me.

I’m buying books again and it’s funny how nothing really ever changes. How life watches us as we run laps around the same circuit time and time again. How the characters of a Dostoevsky novel appear suddenly in any other work of fiction we hold in our hands. How what we’re destined to do never leaves the unconscious and works fervently to surface each and every minute. Even if you turn your back, those books keep coming back.