He had me at Oscar Wilde the title pretty much.
Published author @yahialababidi's excellent essay How Books Can Be Like (ex)Lovers is a must read for every bookworm.
Such was my breathlessly intense, and evidently unhealthy, understanding of literature as an impressionable, voracious teenager. I read to get drunk and, to paraphrase Baudelaire, hoped to stay that way. A clutch of slim volumes altered my intellectual landscape and, at the risk of melodrama, saved my life.
Personally, Oscar Wilde was the second author whom I blame for falling in love with books, after Stephen King whose oeuvre I had read aged 15 already. I had already devoured all children books in the local library at a young age, including the whole The Famous Five before I moved on to adult books around 13 or 14.
But it wasn't until I saw Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest performed by a Flemish experimental teather troop that I truly connected with literature and my reading intensified. Intensified beyond the level of reading because reading was fun. This was amplified few months later only when I got to see Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
Lababidi and I seem to share a similar trajectory, also the age around which we truly fell in love with literature.
By donning a mask of brilliant wit, Wilde seemed to have split himself in two and outdistanced his pain. This was a trick worth learning, my sixteen-year-old self intuited wordlessly, as was his apparently effortless knack for pithy summary. “I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful,” Wilde would go on to say in “De Profundis” (which I devoured shortly afterward, along with all his immodest utterances, in various genres).
Do Profundis, obviously being another Wilde master piece which can not be not read.
I may never possess Michael Gambon's flair or charm, but the library he has in "Layer Cake" is the benchmark - Photo via IMdb
Maybe, despite considering myself a digital nomad who sadly struggles maintaining a physical library because of my nomadic nature, maybe the time has come to finally settle down and make that own, two floors high at least, library a truth.
Head over to @yahialababidi's essay How Books Can Be Like (ex)Lovers
Hey there, this is @FknMayhem's alt account.
Here I mostly tumbl (resteem with added commentary and attitude or snark, a form of advanced curation Steem doesn't offer), zapp, post to forums, and submit other miscellaneous mischief. The latter which may or may not include more personal content. There may be days it can be noisy around here, follow at your own risk. Alternatively, follow my attempts at more in-depth own content on my main account, @FknMayhem. I am also on zeh Titter. Feel free to pitch me your worthy suggestions there. But make them worth my time, please. A SteemAuto curation trail can be joined here (must be logged in) to support and upvote all great content found and curated.