Reading A Book
A slam poem on reading Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age"--or any really good book
So I was reading a book, a hefty tome, one of those you know is gonna change you. You're not gonna see the world the same way hence. The ideas were immense. As I trudged on bent by winds of complexity through alleys lined by monuments of thought, rising on either side of me, glaring, daring me to understand, I realized how very lonely it is to read a book. At first glance it may appear a sincere conversation between author and reader. But go deeper and you find the brutal reality of being lectured by ink. It's enough to sink all hopes of human connection. I started to think. I suspended suspending disbelief. Who could understand what was happening inside— the disruption the corruption of my perfectly prestidigitated worldview? My own edifices of how I see society and self shrink in these alleys— a hovel crowded and overshadowed by skyscrapers of ideas I simply had never looked up to see. Who will I be if I let this knowledge creep in? I panic at the thought I might have to change my mind. Grasping, I cling to the hope of someone else to read along with me, a hand to hold through these narrow pages. But who could come through the same journey when it's my worldview in the crosshairs, my demons being exorcised, my foundations being compromised, my preconceptions being pulverized. No. This journey is my own. To reckon with my own lost innocence. The teachers preach the beneficence of reading but they don't warn you of the alienation from who were before, how you can't ignore knowledge once it sets in. Reading is the original sin. When the serpent tempted Eve, it was with knowledge— knowledge of good and evil. She couldn't comprehend the upheaval of losing who she was to who she might become. No wonder she shrunk in fear and hid with Adam when facing the knowledge that she was responsible to make sense of the story she found herself in. And so I turn these pages warily, mindful of what books I begin, knowing reading is a lonely journey to find out who I am in the end.