Alldessik

Who am I? Question that haunts our existence. As much as we try, we cannot escape it. It comes with the force of a bullet train and hits us more often then we like to. I'm asking myself this question every single day when I wake up and I try answering to it every time I go to bed. No, it's not a religious routine. Just a thought-experiment I practice regularly, because I who slapped the phone to snooze the alarm is not the same I who snuggles under the blanket to read the last chapter of a novel. I drop here some of the answers I came up with in good-like-heaven days, bad-like-a-car-crash days or boring-like-spinach days.

I started reading very early, at a time when phone or  TV were unaffordable commodities or regulated by oppressive governments. For a while, I enjoyed radio-soap operas, but they didn't give me much "fictional satisfaction". After my father had introduced me to Russian literature, I simply couldn't stop devouring it. Even today I feel the need to re-read Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and Pushkin, and Tolstoi. But my favourite is and will always be Boris Pasternak.

I was reading in English, French and German (at that time, with the help of a paper dictionary) with a blunt pencil in my hand and a cheap notebook. I recall late nights spent with Kundera's, Laclos' or Hesse's novels in my grandmother's kitchen, catching the whiff of sauerkraut rolls and polenta by a glowing log fire! Me and my books with no referent for reality.

Holding a book and reading it can suck you into the skin&mind of a character, or teleport you to a totally new place/old place/fictional place, or make you feel happy, miserable, in love or out of love. You are just a cover away from turning into Mr. Darcy or D'Artagnan or Dr. Seuss. If you want to break the overwhelming spell of the overwhelming reality, just summon a book, delve into it and the bridges to reality burn one by one with each page you turn.