Inconvenient truths

I've been doing some reading lately. Well, more precisely, I have done a bit of it when I can bring myself to read more. So much of my work time is spent with words, that sometimes a book seems more like labor than like a musty paper-ensconced friend that is ready to chat whenever I sit down long enough to engage in quiet conversation.

Strangely enough, this week, even at the height of my work-induced reading, when I read a rather stale-to-me magazine cover-to-cover at least once per day as part of my routine, I've still reached for a book when the clock has wound its hands around to time to for me unwind and sever myself from my work umbilical cord (a.k.a. my Dell and the wonder of the Internet). That's been rather mysteriously true even though most days of late that bewitching hour has come just before midnight and I have, in opposition, developed a habit of turning into a pumpkin earlier and earlier. Sometimes I end up feeling a bit like Cinderella at the stroke of 11, when the shoe has dropped: torn between the urgency of the moment and the need to get home before everything, principally my sanity, unravels. The work will always be there, the thought goes, but if I plow through a bit more tonight, maybe it won't be there with such immediacy when I roll out of bed tomorrow.

I have been wending my way through a self-help book, which is enlightening if not enrapturing, but I have also made time for several "pleasure" reads. From Bradbury (October Country) to Steinbeck (The Pearl) to Maguire (Son of Witch), I have had not a shortage of vicarious lives to live and moral lessons to learn. Somehow no matter how fanciful or distant the lives -- whether they be talking Animals, witches or halflings, carnival freaks, dream creatures or impoverished Mexican oyster divers -- they expose the best and the worst of a very ordinary human nature: my own. I find it interesting how even my "pleasure" reads can induce a moral-thought-funk or plenty of mind-dizzying spin when it's time to sleep. I also find it curious that I am drawn to continue reading books I couldn't even claim to "like" in any sense.

That, it seems, is some of the magic of books. Perhaps we read because it's just easier to confront ourselves collectively or as individuals in the guise of fictional people so obviously unlike ourselves, I don't know. Then again, maybe I'm alone in my need to pull from every tale, no matter how frivolous, some lesson, some feeling, to wrap up into my life in a way more important than a foggy and inconsequential memory of a book-spun yarn. Whatever the case, I find myself thinking long and deeply about the people I have met in the books -- the people who are disturbingly like me in some ways and regrettably unlike me -- which is to say, I regret not being more like them -- in others. They carry with them inconvenient truths, sometimes explicitly stated in dialog, sometimes obscured in the folds of the fabric of their lives, but always hidden from immediate apprehension by their cloak of ink on paper.

Among those truths, is this one, tucked on page 324 of Son of a Witch, a book whose pages I kept turning to the end paper, but that I cannot really claim to like, yet. It seemed well-timed, somehow, springing into my life on the heels of 9-11 remembered: The colossal might of wickedness[...]: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Indeed.

How inconvenient.

However, I am pleased and heartened to think there is a flip-side. The good in the world also is a product of what we do between breakfast and bedtime, though its ultimate font is He who is Good. That, I think, is reason enough to keep rolling out of bed, whatever may await on the to-do list. Because it isn't too late to tip the balance in my own life each day toward the good, even if it is equally inconvenient to keep trying.