Finishing a Book (or movie) You Know Will Always Be With You

I have read thousands of books and watched thousands of movies.  A few of them have not only re-configured my emotional constitution, but also reshaped the world outside of me (at least the way I see it and hear it).

I love going to the movies because of the collective experience of human emotion, but I also love books because they can offer you a private very personal experience.  The fact that you can take a book almost anywhere only amplifies that personal feeling.

One result of particular books read in particular places and at particular times? 

They will always be there in those places.  The characters and the plots and the themes of the books will be inflected by those places you read them and the "real" places will be inflected by the fiction.

I remember exactly what two novels I read on the trains of Europe in my twenties (THE NAME OF THE ROSE and POSSESSION) and I remember how fast I read BLANKETS (my favorite graphic novel, on my couch, and then deep into the night in bed at the Tanglewood House.

One night while at the cabin (where I have read hundreds of books),  I was so so close to finishing ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and the night was so so beautiful that I took that old row boat that I have been rowing in for my whole life and I rowed out to the middle of Mackinaw Bay and read in a race with the dying light of the sunset.

Sunsets at the cabin are everybody's favorite.  The front window and the dining room table face the Bay and the sunsets are always just at the right edge of the window and they streak the sky with every imaginable hue depending on the clouds and the temperature and the weather patterns.

That night the sky was on fire and the fire faded exactly at the same pace that I finished the book and it was such a perfect moment of synchronicity as the water settled into the inky black darkness with only the milky way overhead,  that I became aware of how much I love the third act - the final pages of a novel. Particularly a novel I have loved (and yes, also a movie). 

That realization that you are at the end is tinged with grief (you're about to say goodbye to the world) and yet baptized in the feelings memories insights and growth that the novel has given to you.

It's one of the happiest things imaginable.  Of course I had to construct a fictional representation of the event because while there are many photographs of that sunset over Mackinaw Bay, this little sketch from my journal will have to do in evoking eager, happy, impatient, delighted, grief-tinged, and epic-ly satisfied Andrew on that night.

#50thingsofvalue