One who reads, is said to live a million lives.
I for one, am a 17 year old who has travelled across the globe, eras and dimensions through books that respawned me.
The beauty of literature for me, lies in the web of commonality that it creates. Of how a set of similar psyches and emotions work in different measures under the influence of our environment to make us who we are. We fight, thrive and strive to be someone, to be known and to be remembered- all that boils down to a mass of flesh and bones in the end. Our obsession with physical immortality might seem impractical to me, but eventually- after so much, we do live on, in the memory land of people.
Even if not as exact reflections of who we
wanted to be, but still as a fragment of what we were
perceived as. It is the irony of life.
Another thread of cliches that unite humans are the last two years of one's school life. A period that reminds one of Monica Geller screaming,
"Welcome to the real world! It sucks. You're gonna love it."
Such is the thing about love, life and friends- they find you at the right time. My beloved books that were stashed and dusted behind bricks of STEM modules found a new mate that I bought along without much hope from a cathartic, no rent free rant session with a friend at the bookfair.
Who knew that a seemingly feeble, 200 page book named, "Tuesdays with Morrie" recorded in the form of conversations between an old dying professor and his successful student (which too for the record, was written to raise revenue for the former's treatment), could make me feel so validated. I must not quote or summarize parts, for being a believer of serendipity, my expression would be an unfair imposition of my inferences to the blank mind.
I no longer look at 17 as an age to not play with Legos and pliable dough for I'm just about a year away from being on the labelled onset of adulthood, nor do I look at it as an age of insecurities and to whine about the spoilt, wasted days of childhood that could have been spent in preparing a portfolio for all the Ivy League applications. To me, 17 is now a sweet reminder of all that I've known- to know that I have years to grow, cherish, dance and sing along through my art, being and personality. To fix a bazillion puzzles of people and experiences that fill up my senses.
Life is no longer a painful, pointless montage of wasted efforts and existential crisis; for some day I'll decay and die, but a lot more worth because I get to live, for the million cliches that I could mold into niches of my own.
This is the power of a book. A good book- now a sketch, script and song of mine that I dance to.
- Riddhima Dey, 17 (India)