This and that

Eight a.m.'s in many lives are surprisingly the same.
Getting a child dressed for school. Steaming and dicing in the kitchen. Ruffling papers and bags, mobile phones, car keys etc. for another day at work.
And for one little moment, you give up what a plastic identity card says and just look.
Everybody going about their business, and between glances of driving, haggling and pondering, what comes across is how these individuals seem to have a purpose. For that day atleast.

And yet in the seemingly strong willed, it is so easy to drown that feeling. Words meant to cut through skin. A voice raised too high. Hands that shake too much, shake a life sometimes, or even batter its own flesh and blood.
And then that being, the seemingly strong willed, uses a few pieces of tissue and wakes up to another day of purpose, the scars neatly and deeply introduced into the soul.
It is so easy to scar a soul.
Such a fragile thing, it.
Something that time, space, or life cannot capture can be wounded just by the raise of a voice. Or a hand.

And soon the being, the seemingly strong willed being, is just a detail in the poverty of someones mind.

****

Rereading

One of the things that occurs to me everytime I reread a book is how new meanings and dimensions seem to emerge the second or third time around. The words and the writer remain the same.

A detail that did not catch your eye earlier, a line that you did muse on for long enough.
Is it really the book that has changed or is it the reader?
One conversation that has remained tucked in the corner of my mind for years now is early one summer morning while discussing the then newly released God of small things with a friend, we both mused and agreed that there is a book for every age.
As time goes by, and the leaves in our scrap book of experiences increase, interpretations of books change too.

It is like what Pradeep Sebastian says in his article Rereading in The Hindu's Literary Review ( December 5, 2005).
" Increasingly, it seems to me that what a committed reader has with a book is a relationship. And that its like most relationships- sustaining, volatile, vulnerable. "

Through time one relationship that has me feeling loved and warm and swept over by someone with rather high levels of naivete is that with Salinger's works.

Rereading Salinger, I still manage to feel as lost in thought as I used to when I first read him at fifteen.

" If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist sit in on consultation. A hand specialist. I have scars on my hands from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Franny was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's Seventy-second street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charolette once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. Oh, God, if I am anything by a clinical name, I'm kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters, and Seymour An introduction
J. D. Salinger