Still awake and highly susceptible to what I am reading, often believing that the book was written for me, that somehow the author has some unique insight into my soul, my mind, my heart. When really she or he has the magic to translate those discordant feelings, desires, fears, thoughts, and longings universal to humankind into relatable readability.
(Are there really any new stories or are all stories just a variation on themes universal to the human condition? Updated with technological advances and modern conveniences to make them palatable, understandable to a new generation of readers? This leads me to dangerous ground because one might ask aren't those faux books another medium for expressing the plight of the universal condition to a new generation? After all, ancient men inscribed their stories in pictures and symbols on cave walls and slaves sang their stories disguised in songs passed down through the generations, and the elders passed down their stories orally. And yet, there is no substitute for the feeling of the thickness of the book in your hand, the excitement of turning those first pages to get to that first sentence that leads you into another world, allows you to see the universal condition through other viewpoints, genders, situations, through another's eyes. Tangents. This entire paragraph is a tangent.)
Anyway, back to my literary susceptibility. It is almost a form of hypnosis. I am worn down as my body fights off an infection. My elevated white blood cells valiantly fighting against alien invaders aided by their antibiotic ally. I slept hard and woke up and could not fall back to sleep. So I returned to my book---the Thirteenth Tale--which is a story within a story within a story. It is a story about the power of storytelling that pays homage to power of the story, to words, paper and ink books.
The heroine, who works in a bookstore with her father and has a troubled relationship with her mother and who prefers books to life and who measures the timing of the resolution of the story by the thickness of the pages remaining to be read, cannot sleep. By the time that I reach this part of her story, I have been awake and reading in my own story for a bit. I know that I need to be up early, that I have to wash my hair, that I am sick and need the healing power of sleep when I read Margaret's words:
"I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go around in circles all night long. I decided to have a bath."
So, I had a bath. While I waited for the tub to fill with hot water, I read the book just as Margaret tried to work out a clue in her story as she waited for her own tub to fill. Except that the water filling her tub thundered in the background, while the sound of my tub filling in the background was muffled by the thick silence of mounds of opalescent bubbles. Ivory bodywash transformed into airy bits of magic.
Like Margaret, I give myself to the steamy hot water and read several pages as the water cools while she continues to solve the mystery of her story.
Back to Margaret's story which has about a 1/4 of an inch left. And then to sleep, perchance to dream? For about a 1/4 of an inch....
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