Nutrition

“I do not feel as if my day had substance in it, if I have read nothing,”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by John D Richardson

__________

“When it came to books, I greedily devoured a wide range, like I was busily shoveling coal into a blazing furnace. I was so busy every day enjoying one book after another, digesting them (in many cases not properly digesting them), that I didn’t have any time left to think about anything else.”

– Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

__________

I need books, books, books.

To imbibe.

To self-medicate with.

You cannot overdose on books.

You cannot addle your brain with too much reading, too quickly.

You can only take in one word at a time.

Sure, you can become intoxicated, that is the goal!

But the mind has its own gag reflex. If you dive too deep for too long, it shuts off and demands some trashy TV to counterbalance all the weighty moods and ideas ingested.

There is nutrition in these paper pulp pages.

Energy for the day.

Building mental muscle to endure.

To survive the bleak winter.

I am a bear, I have put on winter fat. I bed down and live off these word calories.