Friday, May 11, 2007

Endless Conversations

A dangerous thing


By TONY EVANS

Tony Evans

I look around my room at half-read books and undeveloped ideas lying in heaps. The Arthurian Romances may forever remain book marked with Gawain in the enchanted wood, rather than pushing on to Percival and his arduous quest. I have a Beck CD that gets reset again and again to the first three songs. Has anyone out there actually gotten to the end of the "Upanishads"? How about the last issue of Vanity Fair? Completion seems so... 20th Century to me now. I wasn't always like this.

I used to read every book to its bitter end and eat everything on my plate no matter how distasteful the experience. Once, while deep in a public library, wondering which tail to grab the world by, I came upon Schopenhauer's essays—a tome so vast and intriguing I might crawl inside it and live there for the summer. Some books are meant to be put down; some channels to be changed, vegetables to be avoided.

That night I dreamt of canyon walls made of book shelves extending to the horizon above a lake at twilight. In the dream I reached for a book by Melville and suddenly realized I was being hunted by a slow-moving blind monster that intended to kill me. After reading a few lines I would quickly replace the book and run for my life before stopping again to furtively read a bit more. Finally, I took off my shoes and floated into the lake, hoping the monster would pass me by.

When I woke up I returned to the library and found a book of famous quotations collected through the ages; sound bites and proverbs that might cut to the quick of wit and wisdom so I could once more go out and play. Alexander Pope wrote, "A little learning is a dangerous thing...," warning me against going off half-cocked and ill-informed into life. His countryman, Oscar Wilde, wrote, "Creation begins on the day you are born and ends on the day you die...," as if to say that my own time-bound existence was the engine of all that mattered.

It took several years to realize they were both correct. Thoroughness is no more important than creativity. It may be necessary to finish my okra and "Moby Dick," but not at the expense of taking some risks and perhaps forming some ideas I could call my own. I could no longer think my way out of a life I had lived my way into.

Outside the library window that day there were cottonwood limbs swinging in the spring wind, an interesting person across town I had not yet met...perhaps some secret call to creation. Of course I took a book along with me, but only just in case.




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