Being at the end of the trail with no more objectives other than keeping wrapped up to prevent getting ill and questioning the years still available, one realises that the natural healthy progression which our psychic instils in us when we are younger, somehow dissipates when we get old. As an antidote to this depressing fact I offer you "a good book".
There are two reasons for reading. One is for information, the other is companionship. We are all mentally isolated if we like it or not and even the close attention of a loving wife does not overcome our inherent isolation.
The gulf between events and our comfortable predictions, things which hope for is an ongoing and continuous reconciliation. We excuse our hopes from reality by hoping some more, and in the process we realise just how fragile our actual world really is. We try to bolster our spirits with a holiday or by buying something but this is usually a sticking plaster to cover a deeper wound. The wound is the incontrovertible fact, especially as we get older that time, those minutes in a day or the ones you share with your fears at night, are outside your control and after all, control is what we crave. The insecurity is heightened as we realise how no amount of shopping will fill the gap.
Reading is one, perhaps the only therapy, where you absolve yourself and become someone else. You escape your own plc and the responsibilities of always reporting to the board of directors, of which your wife is chairman and the children out vote you.
Instead you join the posse as it ranges across the desert in pursuit of the bad guys, you join the defending barrister in trying to get the chap off, or you become friends with a character dreamed and created by another mind, who for a moment or two had also escaped reality.
Replacing life with fiction, the fiction from a book is far healthier than troubling yourself with the fiction of your own life.
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