Day 288

8PM:

What we encounter, they leave impressions, marks.

For the last four months, I have been doing a book “competition” – it started as something else, but mutated into a self-care challenge, something that kept me doing something without doing something.  I have shown these marks, these impressions, in different posts since May.  Some of these marks have left cuts, speaking to the demon, the blackness inside of me.  Some of these marks have helped exorcise some of those demons.  And some of them are yet to be determined.

These impressions are only as important as my impression of them.  I listened to the words, heard what I wanted to hear depending on how I was feeling at that time.  Depending on what order in which I read them, the impressions would have been dramatically different, could have changed.  The marks look different depending on what I was ready to get from the words at that particular moment in time.  As Tom Rachman wrote in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: “Tooly avoided talking to Noeline about him, dwelling instead on what linked them: books.  They had read hundreds of the same works, yet in a completely different way.  Tooly took a book as the creation of one particular brain, while Noeline viewed text as context, each work the fruit of its times, sown by manifestos, fertilized by historical events, harvested in orchards that petered out, burst forth again, producing a landscape known as the Culture.  Such classification, Tooly argued, wrecked a work – akin to seeking the soul of a girl by dissecting her body” (160).

The impact of such works, of such words, are just as much about us as they are of what happens around the works.  Neither one took into account the reader, the one who ultimately takes the words off of the page, digests them in their synapses and uses those articles to speak to the inner workings of their soul.

This weekend marks the end of my four-month Summer Book Challenge.  This weekend will allow a peering in to how some of the works I have read – that my ME has collected – have spoken and been heard by the inner workings of my soul.

Are you ready?