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1.
Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.
2.
Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.
3.
Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.
4.
Good advice. I’ll go eat. And then sleep. and then …
You know when you have too much spare time on your hands and all of a sudden your mind goes blank as you try to find possible things to do?
And then all of a sudden you remember something…It comes from far far away, the ever so distant and vague memory of holding a book that wasn´t on your “must read for exam” list.
Then comes the more tragic moment in which you realize that you (very rationally) decided to pack only two books with you for the whole three summer months you will be working. Why? Oh, because you figured you´d have nooo time for that. Dunno what you were thinking…
But then it dawns on you. Ok, this is getting annoying.
Then it dawned on me…I had seen a bookshop on my way home from work. It even had a small couple of shelves with reduced books in front of the shop. So I decided to take a look.
It was a second hand book shop. Actually…maybe they should be called second mind…or perhaps it is called second hand because whichever books land here were probably only picked up and dusted by the previous owners, if they decided to give them away.
Maybe some passionate old relative had bought them some years ago, hoping his nephew, niece, son would have the same taste in books. Tough luck. They were just gonna sell it for 2.99 at the first bookshop they would find.
In a more pragmatic tone: just my luck.
Long story short, after half an hour in there I realized it was the place to revisit after my first paycheck (ah, paycheck sounds so professional …sounds as if I have an office job, haha). The smell of old books was juuust right (not the mouldy one you might get in some shops, but the flavoured, spicy smell of pages upon pages of personal stories wrapped up in third person narratives, historical memoirs and whatnot, paperback, leatherbound, hardcopy, you name it!). That was a large parenthesis. But I bought a book of the reduced shelf. 3 dollars for a hardcover. Not bad, I thought, not bad at all.
Last precious item I found in a used book store was a dictionary, a trilingual one, English- German- French. I spent 25 lei on it…that would be less than 10 bucks, and it was from 1841.
Now I am reading a not so valuable as a collectors´s item book, (or is it? tadadadaduuum) but one that I consider a grea find anyway. It´s a Saul Bellow that I hadn´t heard of before. It´s called “More die of heartbreak”.
I must say I do not know if that is statistically so, but I should say it is more painful a death than many others. Not that I would know, for my past lives have spared me of such traumatizing experiences, but I see how that could be true.
I did the shallow kind of research on the book, wikipediaing my good man Bellow´s novel and found out that the book was written in ´87 (not much of a coincidence freak, but it´s a nice one, nevertheless). And the book cover they showed on wikipedia was just like mine. There it said “ a first edition”. And so it is. A first edition of a Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner.
I am reading a book as old as me, called “More die of heartbreak”.
If I ever have the time or -more importantly, as I am currently out of it- talent and inspiration, I´ll write a sequel called “Some live happily ever after”. Might be filed under Science Fiction, but we´ll see about that:D
I don´t know exactly when it started…when I started looking on the ground for treasures, but I know it goes way back.
I distinctly remember being in New Mexico, in a place called Acoma where there were these Native Americans, the Acoma Pueblo, living on a 370 foot high rocky surface.
The 7 year old Mara from back then heard the guide say something like “a lot of precious stones can be found in this area”. And from that phrase on, I had my eyes glued to the ground, in search for some shiny stones.
Then I remember bringing all kinds of smooth pebbles from the seaside, for my grandmother to have…cause I thought they were magic, or real diamonds that needed a bit of help to shine.(on, like crazy…)
This passion for finding things…might be tied to the detective tv series I loved to watch as a kid, and still do. The idea that opening your eyes just a bit can help you see sooo much more than what other people see, the fact that you can find quintessential elements that some other people needed to solve some long forgotten puzzle…it´s part of the whole thing.
So ok, parents say watch where you´re going, don´t look at your feet, look around too, don´t pick things up from the ground, you might never know where they´ve been. But I´m 2 now:D
On Friday I was walking towards the Williamsburg Transportation Center, to pick up my friend Ana who was arriving there.
So that is how I spotted it, in the grass, at the base of a tree. It was blue-green, a faded colour, but so beautiful and smooth, and I stepped closer to see that it was not some plastic candy wrapper, but 3 quarters of a tiny eggshell, baby bird had made its exit a while ago.
It was not some Easter egg, with fake colouring, or some plastic toy. It was the most beautifully coloured thing, the most fragile, and wonderful thing I had ever found…
At the Williamsburg Transportation center I met and old man, a really nice college professor from Massachusetts (there´s a song that goes “and the lies..all went down in Massachusetts”). After talking about stuff like the American society today and the Romanian society in communist Romania, we had to part ways (Ana´s bus had arrived!) and I showed him the egg that I was holding in teh palm of my hand.
“Oh, that´s a robin´s egg. “, the jolly old bearded man said, thus solving the mystery I was ready to google when I got home.
As we walked away he said “may your hearts remain as pure as that robin´s egg”.
And I hope he knew more than I knew, or saw in me more than I see, because I sure wish that whatever level of “pure” is still left in my heart will remain, or increase…
For there is nothing worse than losing hope and faith in the world you are born into.
*pic via http://depts.washington.edu/natmap/photos/birds/robin_eggs_20070426_01tfk.jpg
