Too Loud A Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal

I concede that this is not a legitimate first post, given that it is Hrabal, and not me, who is doing most of the writing. At any rate, his work is so exquisite that I feel compelled to share it, at the expense of what would be my own self-conscious words.

The opening lines of Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude:

"For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias - and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which come from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop,or I sup it like a liquer until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. In an average month I compact two tons of books, but to muster the strength for my godly labors I've drunk so much beer over the past thirty-five years that it could fill an Olympic pool, an entire fish hatchery. Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin's lamp".

To start off...

This week I did quite a bit of writing. I felt for the first time the freedom to express my thoughts in a patterned way: in a way of words I mean. Even though I enjoy my roommate's company most days, I have become extremely self-conscious around her. She uses very precise language (even though she is by no means "exact" in the sense that her speech has all kinds of usage errors and general inaccuracies - geez I hope I spelled that right) and she presses me for precise language. If I offer vague descriptions of my day, she'll question and prod until I'm flustered and embarrassed. Now, I generally just say, "fine" or "okay" because I don't really feel like putting the energy into a precise description.

Anyway, this paralyzing self-consciousness in my speech transfers to my writing most days. But this week, I felt (for whatever reason) a lot more free than I have in a long time. SO I wrote the following limerick:

Whenever I start to wonder why
I'm missing the sunny days of July
I dream myself a tale
And the fins of a whale
And slip into the sea of my sigh.

The end.

(there's more for later...)