update on living
lately ive been feeling like living which feels quite good. for instance today i went to the library. most libraries in perth are not very good. they bin almost every book as soon as it shows a sign of having been read, so you are left with aisles of crisp, glossy rectangles of dubious quality. at least a spluttered and dogeared book gives you some hope, a feeling of following in an unrelated ancestor's footsteps. but why am i telling you this. the uwa library is really good. it is the best one still living. some of the books are over a hundred years old and you can just flick through them. i looked through a 1000 page tome of appalachian folk songs and found new verses for some of my old favourites. i found a whole shelf of robert creeley chapbooks and an incredible book called "six lectures on the recorder and other flutes as mentioned in literature". you have to believe me when i say its a riot.
and i had this pile of six or seven books and i kept having more ideas for things i am mildly interested in and kept going back to the computer and finding the dewey decimal number and looking at the book and the surrounding books, and then i had a pile of 12 that i'd never be able to read, and then i realised: life can be a really long time if you let it be. if i stay alive as everyone else i know seems obsessed with doing then time will be no object, i'll be able to read and read until my mind stops working.
so i put 11 of the books back and thought, i have the rest of my life to read them, and i took out the one on recorders.