Rush the Iceberg

I love what Neil Peart once wrote in Rush song, “The point of the journey, is not to return.”

I want to finish reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet, I do not want to finish it. Well, I’m actually not quite sure what I want to do. I have begun it many, many times. However, I have yet to finish.

Finishing novels is difficult because I do not want the novel’s world to stop spinning in my imagination. I want to feel like I can go and hang out with the characters anytime. I want to discover new things about the characters – I have often been in circumstance A and thought, “What would Jose Arcadio Buendia do?”. I then go back to the novel and get vicarious life experience.

Maybe I should say I want to go further into …Solitude’s magical world, become fully immersed in its surreality.

I am on page 100 of 417. It has taken me about seven years/restarts to get to this point. I can’t really tell you what is happening other than something is going on with ice and gypsies are creepy. I’m not even sure if that is accurate!

But, that is what makes this novel so good! It’s that tantalizing feeling when you have to sneeze, knowing the joy of release, yet you are left with your head tilted back, hand half way up to cover your mouth. That feeling – we all know it – is how I describe what I have read so far of this novel.

Many, if not all, of the sentences are worthy of an undlerline, side note, or a daily post on Tumblr.

Yeah, I know, I can read it and then re-read passages or the entire thing whenever I want.

But the joy of discovery is lost.

I never want to lose the joy of discovery.

In college I wrote a paper on the British Romantics and how they were often depressed once they got the object of their obsession.

Wordsworth was upset when he realized he crossed Alps a few days earlier…

Mary Shelley illustrates this when Dr. Frankenstien’s creation goes crazy (he even dances, “Puttin’ on the Ritz…“)

And Byron, was the dude ever satisfied with anything he ever chased after?

A few months after completing 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami I can honestly say I do not remember much about the book. I enjoyed reading it and all. But felt let down, and still do, after completing it. But, WHILE reading it, I was enthralled! I felt as if I was walking under two moons.

Anticipation is better than the real thing.

Well, this summer I will be reading about forty more pages of “…Solitude” and likely stop.

What novel does a similar thing to you?