#average readers

It was after I left graduate school to write. The first failures were to be expected and I came to understand how little I knew about living. I resolved to read. Over 80 books in that first year. There was a point while engaging Nietzsche that I was confronted with a truth I struggle with to this day. He made it clear that those who were not writers, poets, artists and philosophers, that everyday folks like me should not be reading him, that essentially it would be dangerous and a waste of time. So much room for misunderstanding and misconstrual. I acknowledged his admonition and forged ahead. And as each year passed in failure, going on 30 years now, Nietzsche was ever-present, smirking and berating in High German. But here’s the deal, though not a writer but simply a reader who writes to understand, Edna O’Brien speaks to me. Reading isn’t escapism. Books that don’t deliver have no appeal. So, over time, I read Dostoyevsky, and Emerson, and Nietzsche, and D. H. Lawrence, and de Beauvoir, and Bakunin, and Mumford, and Whitman et al., and it’s like, how do you quit?, how do you stop? O’Brien nailed it, literature becomes sustaining and necessary, “food for the soul and the heart.” Failure then becomes a means to an enriching, imaginative life, a means to a more deeply felt joy and love.