On work, and what life is.

Without warning the work has begun. On Wednesday I filled a page-and-a-half of a blank jotter book with details of his childhood. On Thursday I did not have the mood to write anything. Instead I spent the day reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. It is truly a beautiful story, and as I read I remembered those insights that once came to me and those that Adrian once shared with me, and there they are, all in the book too. Often, when I encounter stories that mimic situations in my life, I would be amused by a sense of illusion about reality, as if my life were created from these stories and I was to read them someday. I would then wonder if I am not a character in a book as well, reading a story about one who resembles myself, and is in turn a writer working on a novel using experiences from his life. Such depths it can go to! Yet life cannot be a book, for if it were then the author must be a very bad writer to have included all sorts of insignificant fillers, details such as hanging out every single piece of laundry to dry, or brushing the teeth everyday.

So one does his work on some days, and does not on some other days. Man is neither greater nor lesser in that way. There are lives, and then there are great books about people's lives, but it is not the same between reading about one and living one.