A long drive stretching several hours with your loved one?
A candle on a warehouse table where you work overnight, just out of your sticky passion?
A puddle in the street where a child plays with his paper boat?
A concert?
A solitary party?
Star-gazing on the terrace?
Perhaps all of the above, and much more. Personal choice. You bet.
Its not the book; its the indulgance. In the hectic life filled with assembled tasks demanding accuracy and ever-reappearing emotional stress, we rarely "indulge". A good book satisfies that need. Indulgence is the sole mental nutrient.
This is easy to experience, but different for everyone, so bit tricky to explain. Buts lets try out. Indulgence is like poking your head into a completely unknown (or maybe remotely familiar) window, shoving it in a heap of quite unseen and unfelt things, and then finally coming into resonance with the surroundings, letting it drag you along.
A good book serves your indulgence well. After a while that you have begun to live with its characters (or content, if you are a nonfiction buff), flipping those pages feels like dragging the glass of water to your mouth when someone hands it to you, without actually registering the event. That's indulgence.
Its pure bliss when you read. Sometimes you love it that it keeps you unsatisfied at the end. Sometimes you hate it for everything that has fallen into its place. No matter what, its a fulfillment. If none of it, you fret about it a minute or two, and catch the sleep. Enter reader's block. Many a times, its a progeny of somebody's patched-up work who suffered a writer's block, and never fully recovered from it.
But that doesn't keep you from picking up a book again. You cannot stop indulging yourself over a longer period of time. Be it Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or any romantic Victorian work: the literature, the art, with its full force of vicinity to human life, keeps challenging your reader's block until you finally attend to it.
Indulgance is a necessary evil if you call it so. So are wine, women and Internet games.
But without it, believe me, there is no life.
So what's your favourite bedside book?
A candle on a warehouse table where you work overnight, just out of your sticky passion?
A puddle in the street where a child plays with his paper boat?
A concert?
A solitary party?
Star-gazing on the terrace?
Perhaps all of the above, and much more. Personal choice. You bet.
Its not the book; its the indulgance. In the hectic life filled with assembled tasks demanding accuracy and ever-reappearing emotional stress, we rarely "indulge". A good book satisfies that need. Indulgence is the sole mental nutrient.
This is easy to experience, but different for everyone, so bit tricky to explain. Buts lets try out. Indulgence is like poking your head into a completely unknown (or maybe remotely familiar) window, shoving it in a heap of quite unseen and unfelt things, and then finally coming into resonance with the surroundings, letting it drag you along.
A good book serves your indulgence well. After a while that you have begun to live with its characters (or content, if you are a nonfiction buff), flipping those pages feels like dragging the glass of water to your mouth when someone hands it to you, without actually registering the event. That's indulgence.
Its pure bliss when you read. Sometimes you love it that it keeps you unsatisfied at the end. Sometimes you hate it for everything that has fallen into its place. No matter what, its a fulfillment. If none of it, you fret about it a minute or two, and catch the sleep. Enter reader's block. Many a times, its a progeny of somebody's patched-up work who suffered a writer's block, and never fully recovered from it.
But that doesn't keep you from picking up a book again. You cannot stop indulging yourself over a longer period of time. Be it Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or any romantic Victorian work: the literature, the art, with its full force of vicinity to human life, keeps challenging your reader's block until you finally attend to it.
Indulgance is a necessary evil if you call it so. So are wine, women and Internet games.
But without it, believe me, there is no life.
So what's your favourite bedside book?
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