(no subject)

I just finished reading A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle. I asked my siblings to bring it when they came, and a late night or two and an hour at school this morning finished it off for me. It's not a particularly long book.

It has, however, been a while since the last time I read it. There were many things I didn't remember, so it was a pleasure to meet the characters again. And a little frightening to realize just how much of that book I've internalized, how many fragments of wisdom and bits of philosophy that I've digested and made part of my own personal worldview. The Last Unicorn is much the same. I read those two books, and I get to this paragraph or that paragraph, and it's like I'm reading my self in the book, reading my own thoughts, reading the shape of me in a stranger's hand.

They still make me ache, but not as terribly as they once did. Perhaps because that ache, too, has become a part of me, and after so long it's almost comfortable. A pain that's an old friend, with familiar habits and mannerisms.

It is possible for a book to change you, to change the way you see and what you know. I thought it an improbable plot device in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but all you have to do is find that book for yourself and you know it for truth.

Seen on a calligraphy tile at Ryoan-ji: "I change, and the whole world changes."