He read the last page, turned over the book in his hands and stroked its cover with some affection. That specific tale now felt safely stored, still seeping into and along through his veins. Its pulse alive still within his memory bank of imaginative worlds. William absolutely loved the act of reading, and as a consequence rarely went out much. He might go for a walk when he had 'a good day' and willingly do the entire circular walk around the nearby park. Great for cardiovascular exercise' though that may be. A good book, well that could transport him to places his mid twentieth century legs could never carry him. Conjure up emotions that otherwise might be left dormant or atrophied through lack of use.
The internet had become his saviour, as he could order anything he needed without the need to go out and physically buy and fetch it. The supermarket delivery van brought him all his food, and much more. Apart from going to the Library, browse the local bookshop, or visit the Medical Practice to collect his medicines, he rarely had any other purposeful reason to go into the town at all, The more distant city? well hardly ever. Far too many people panicking or in a furious hurry. He could feel their careless haste in the louche style of their clothes, the haphazard dashes of colouring in their hair, a directionless surfeit of attention floating around them in an aura of stressed pheromones. Often very pushy and self righteously too loud. There were never enough hours in the day for urbanistas.
He could see how they too sensed 'the end times' were indeed drawing ever closer. And by focusing so intently on distracting themselves, they hoped to not to see its arrival coming over the hill. The evil monster of death they hoped would just jump out of nowhere and gobble them up. As an older and now distinctly world weary man, yes he could, strangely enough, empathise with their predicament. For his own terminal resignation was everyone's now. This was yet another reason not to go out, to stay in and surrender oneself to being beguiled by another book.
Nevertheless, like many a retired and prematurely widowed gentlemen living on their own William had a list of 'projects' he desired to complete before the end drew nigh. They weren't written down anywhere, but lodged in his mind. Just so long as he maintained all his marbles they'd be remembered. He'd see to it they were systematically completed. Realistically he no longer had a full day of energy left in him, so he had to pace himself with these 'project work periods'. Making the most of the mornings perky recharge, then he cooked and ate his lunch, before taking an afternoon nap. All the time that remained assigned to reading. Everything executed in the slow and meticulous manner that his maturity and physical poise prescribed.
At least that was always the plan he thought he had fixated in his mind. But recently he got this unsettling feeling that actually he was wistfully wasting away his remaining years on Earth. Any 'projects' completion becoming more protracted, as the days of rain, excessively torrential wind, and the arrival of a freakishly tropical oppressive humidity, increased. Accompanied by those mornings when he just couldn't be arsed. All these reasons to delay projects began to run into each other. Meaning any weekly steady as you go plan turned into a runaway train escaping any directional plan. Far too easily he vegetated into the welcoming arms of a comely novella.
Once he got a hundred pages in then he really had to stick with it, no matter what. Novels from small but perfectly formed to an unwieldy trilogy or gargantuan epic, with the occasional topical non fiction, a little bit of history. Whatever the genre he felt compelled to focus on getting them finished, before time itself ran out. His life once so driven and filled with purposeful flourishes of activity, was now gently, almost imperceptibly, being repainted in nerdy bookish colours. Hence the creeping sedentary nature of it. He read about all sorts of people, explored the world through the vivid imaginations of others. All reached from the comfort of his own living room sofa. Lifting his finger only to turn a page.
When to stop and cook himself a meal, became mediated through how many pages of a book he had left to read. Just another ten pages and that would be halfway, or two thirds, or its only fifty pages from the end - let's go for it! Completing reading a nourishing book taking priority over actual nutrition. Not all books won his instant approval. So when he found a book he loved from its opening paragraphs, he was propelled into a state comparable to a spiritual, nay transcendental, uplift. Ecstatically life fulfilled for the brief few hours whilst reading it. For William a great book was manna from heaven, a God given thing. The universal being was speaking directly to meet his most heartfelt desires. These moments were so very rare, he cherished them the minute they emerged. Slowing his pace of reading so he could wonder at the phrasing, the construction of each sentence, to fully absorb its conjured mood. To intravenously feed and fix his soul, so repeatedly injured by every time he read a daily newspaper.
He began to really hate it when a book wasted what time he had. Turning out to be disappointing in its basic premise or worse just dull, dull, dull. Then all progress would stall. Time dragging at the heels of his engagement. To give up on a book, however, would be synonymous with giving up on life. Who on earth would voluntary chose to do that? Novels that were far too cleverly constructed for their own boots. That hurled the reader over a whole gymkhana of linguistic jumps, of abandoned punctuation with complex sentence structures rendered willy-nilly, all to no real gain in meaning or enriching of the narrative. What a waste of time and space those sort of writers were. Their masturbatory self congratulatory indulgences poisoning his enjoyment. He cursed them!
He frequently toyed with the idea of writing a scathing letter to be forwarded to the author by their publisher. But all that would take time away from his reading programme, so such ripostes rarely got much further than a clearly withering opening Dear Sir or Madam. He hoped the future cataclysm would permanently erase such literary aberrations. Though he had one recurring nightmare, that in the coming Armageddon all that survived of literary culture would be his Post Modern bete noire. And in the future, some misfortunate alien visitor would then be left the dispiriting task of deciphering what this endless stream of garbage meant. Trying to establish why late capitalist humankind valued being so deliberately opaque in communicating itself. What was it trying to hide?
Like a lot of avid readers Matthew liked to think he read spontaneously, sensitive in the way he responded to his intuitions. But in reality it was more of a deliberate hunting down of a familiar style of prey, than that. Scanning book reviews, interviews with authors, book shows on TV, or by You Tubers, recommendations from a friendly Librarian, and those scruffily hand written notes by staff on the shelves of his local bookshop. If any of these perked his interest, they were added to his book list, which having become obscenely obese had occasionally to undergo a purge. Focusing first on the books he could no longer remember why he'd listed them in the first place. To be followed by those whose moment had patently passed.
Today he was in the opening pages of a new novel, whose cover artwork of a quintessentially dream like Chagall cockerel he'd been drawn too. The novel called The Passing Place, was by an author unknown to William - Bernadette Alderman. Thus far the reading had not been progressing at all well. He already had a really bad feeling about it. The prose style was incredibly dense and hard to chew on, so portentously was it wrought with a leaden spirit. His eyes had only to briefly scan its lengthy sentences and he could feel them begin to drowse then droop. Then he'd jolt back awake, only to repeat the very same cycle, but a few minutes later. He wasn't tired from lack of sleep. He wasn't even that physically weary. There was, so he thought a soporific intent woven into the entire literary construction of this book, one that appeared to lead to recumbent slumber as its desired outcome. The text itself was inducing this deep, existential level of boredom.
The story, was a slight character study of a man, who despite all his best efforts, was seemingly doomed to living a life of obscurity. William had thought there was enough in this that he might personally resonate with, to perhaps make it worthwhile. Instead he found himself fighting, both with the book and his own descent into napping at any moment or time of day. He'd awaken laid back on the sofa with the book splayed open like chest armour, and realise half the morning had gone by. And with each increasingly turgid turn of the page these periods of sleep appeared to be getting longer and longer. Until he seemingly had lost an entire day without really noticing. He'd had his breakfast at sun up, started reading and the next thing it was sun down. He could not allow this to go on. He'd have to cease reading it, bin it, burn it, give it to a charity shop, shove it in a book bank. Just put this unhappy state of affairs to its deservedly ignominious end.
He failed to fully carry through on his resolve. Instead inserting a book mark where he'd read up to, and placed the book back on his 'To Read' pile, stacked waist high on the living room carpet. Then he did what he usually did after putting a pause on a challenging read, he reached for the predictability of a detective novel set in medieval times. Even as he refocused his attention on its indulgently trashy novelty, he could feel this pulling on his mind back to The Passing Place. Sitting there inert and unfinished, accompanied by his conscience, perched like a whingeing gremlin on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. This bore all the characteristic habits of drug addictions he'd read about. Nonetheless he felt this compelling need to pick it up and casually look at its pages again, just one little peak. Was it really as bad as all that? Surely not. Maybe its not the book at all, its me.
Upon reading one word of one sentence, he was overwhelmed by a wooziness that ricocheted up,down and across his body, until it hit and exploded like a firecracker in his brain. He could feel himself slumping backwards. A sensation of being knocked over, replaced by the spinning of his spreadeagled body in space, his legs and arms akimbo. An origami like folding together of his beslippered body followed, as though he was a quarto being sewn into the spine of a book. All this happening in the slowest of slow motions. Sensing his own helplessness ever more keenly during each micro second. As his decrepit physicality crumpled, was atomised and then reabsorbed into the content of The Passing Place book itself.
This encompassing vastness consumed him, absorbing as it did every book Matthew had ever read.. Burying itself inside an immense library containing all people,all cultures, all life, all worlds, all universes, all possibilities, all the gods and goddesses of pasts, presents and futures. Each book was burnished and with a surrounding glowing white light floated around space as though they were these folded paper angels decorating the heavens. Each with the same important message to be declared. One that all mankind was to read, inwardly digest and be totally consumed by in the coming millennia of tragedy.
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