so much i want to do. Frustrating that I get bursts of creative energy followed by extremely paralyzing lulls of motivation. I wish i could move and create as fast as i can think sometimes. i want to paint, work on my mosaic, sew, read, hike in the snow, thrift store shop, write a letter to a good friend, plan a trip and create this blog all in one day. i am currently reading The Brothers Karamazov again, i read it years ago and knew i liked it but couldn't remember much about it. It is a difficult but rewarding read. Like other Russian novels I have read, it is darkly idealistic, exploring the selfish, almost evil, depravity of man's relationships with one another; punctuated by a few almost saintly, heart-warming interactions . A battle between the ideal extremes of the hopeless condition of man's innate disease of the soul vs brief, bright flashes of a wonderful, almost unheard-of possibility of total redemption. As with most novels of this caliber, it is extremely helpful to start a piece of scratch paper in the beginning with characters names..as these Russian names are long and confusing, and nicknames are interchanged with middle names and last names. I am about 3/4 way through. Incindentally, i am also in the middle of 4 other books...another telling example of my flighty excursions from one great idea to the next.
I will go on a slight tangent and state my unequivocal OPINION regarding electronic reading devices vs print, bound books. The older and more yellowed and smelly the book, the more convinced I am of its authenticity and value. I cannot abide even the THOUGHT of a print-less future and reading on a LCD screen instead of the crumbly, yellowed pages of an old paperback novel. Farenheit 451 comes to mind. Like 1984, a frightening prediction of what a "main-stream only" society might one day mean. Granted, the words making up the two mediums are identical. The intrinsic value of the reading experience, in my quite-often-wrong-opinion, is not. Which leads me, meanderingly, to my next topic. Which is mysteriously related to my favorite laundromat. Which i will leave to you, my reader, to ponder why.
AUTHENTICITY is probably a word that will come up quite often in my blogs, it seems to be the one recurring theme that haunts a majority of my waking and even sleeping moments. Far from being a dualistic term, authenticity involves an indescribable quality of value...the best thing i have ever read regarding this concept is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A book of almost maddening genius. Since authenticity is not a term with dualistic connotations and the subsequent catorgorizing into good/bad, cool/notcool, heaven/hell, etc etc human judgements, authenticity goes by almost unrecognized and unvalued in the Western culture. Seems to me that the people of Eastern descent have a much more intuitutive appreciation for the "term/concept". Try to define authenticity. I simply cannot, and that astounds me, as do all things that cannot really be defined. But i know it when i see it and experience it, and it moves me in a way nothing else can move me. Very rare, it is to me The Pearl of Great Price. More to follow.
