It was Saturday again, and like so many Saturdays this year, I woke up a little too fresh, too rested and much later than I had intended. The sun had come out and already warmed everything. Still lost in the daze of how well I had slept the night before, I slowly moved towards the kitchen and stretched my arms on the way there. I brewed a cup of coffee, and wanting to write, I slowly brought it to the table and began hacking away. A song with a looming presence of the harmonica played on the speaker. I didn’t know its name—there were just far too many pieces of music to remember each of them. I thought of just how much art we make and stopped writing. I turned my eye to the book I was yet to finish reading or, if I’m being honest, begin reading. I have made little to no progress and felt guilty since it stared at me for a month. Each day, this overwhelming surge of art crashed over me and slowly suffocated me. I believe it was how everyone felt too. We make so much art as a species today—it is overwhelming and brilliant.
I wish I could read all the books I want to read in this life, but between the masters, whose work I must read, and the contemporary, all that is relevant today, I often read nothing on most days. This will not do, however. All writers must read. I am working on it, and like many things we want to work on, it is slowly turning into a pipe dream. I sat at the desk, attempting to calculate how many books I could read in this lifetime if I read diligently and voraciously. Then, I gave up, like I had given up on the book on my desk. There was just simply too much to consume. The best I could manage was reading a poem every day. That is all I have been doing for a long time now.
So, I decided to call a friend, and we went out for brunch, and the sun, the cups of coffee, and the conversation were, in many ways, reading too. If they weren’t, it still seemed like a productive excuse. November was still going strong on us. Before I knew it, the sun had set giving way to a seamless pink overlay over the sky.
I thought, what a day, and decided to end it, knowing that I had not read properly in months, but I had lived; you could always write about that.