All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Rereading
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Rereading isn't quite the right word for the practice, is it? One is doing anything but simply retreading over familiar material. The experience is a completely different, unique pleasure. Familiarity meets strangeness; it must be something both intellectual (the mind works to remember facts, details from the first reading) and imaginative (no matter how many times you have read something, you always get caught up in the suspense or world).
I recently went back to the first novel in a 20-novel series that I adore. The strangeness of it was the most thrilling thing. There were all of my favorite characters, doing the things they typically did, yet they were utterly different creations than the ones I knew. Was I going backward? Forward? Both?
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