Thursday, April 16, 2026

Thursday, April 16, 2026

After reading the nightmarish poem, “A Dream” by Hermann Hesse in his book, The Glass Bead Game, I shuddered. A feeling of restlessness creeped in. The only way I could eliminate that feeling was to journal about it. I wrote what ended up being a short short story. 

Here is a summary:

I walk to the monastery on the hill and enter the building. Its walls are lined with books from ceiling to floor. The spines of the gilded lettered books glitter in the morning light. I pull out the one closest to me. The spine reads, Meaning of My Life. The leather cover tooled in gold promises a story still untold. What wisdom will the book reveal?

I read the front folio aglow with words, “Learn to see separately with two eyes and separately with two ears. You’ll see sound and hear colors.” I read the first five pages. I am in paradise. 

All knowledge stands at my command. Volumes filled with stories, scholarship, wisdom. My thirst is finally going to be quenched. I examine the next book and the next. Awed and delighted, I look away to take in what I have realized and give my eyes a rest. I notice a man standing in front of the tomes. Who can that be? An archivist? Librarian? A monk bedazzled? 

I walk closer to him. A few steps away, I watch him engrossed in the task he is doing. His slow, blue-veined frail hands intent on holding a book and inspecting what is inside. I see him blowing with his pallid lips upon the book. His fingers wipe across the spine, then each page inside the covers. Silently, he erases the text and replaces it, page by page. He keeps pacing and repeating this with each book he holds.

What is he doing? Once again, I pull out Meaning of My Life. He has touched and blown on it, too. No longer do I see the title or the text that transported me to bliss with its wisdom. Its universe is dissolved, faded, rewritten. He has blown on its pages new formulas, new problems and promises, replacing the wisdom of the ancient past. He plies his magic style on all the volumes and then disappears.”

Can you imagine a world where knowledge and wisdom and insight is constantly rewritten? Who decides what information will be shared and what will be discarded? Having a library of such volumes changed is almost as horrifying as having no books at all, or choosing not to read when you know how.

I’m grateful to my father for inculcating the habit of daily reading in me from an early age. Listening as he read to me, slowly graduating to read myself, escaping into absorbing new worlds… What a blessing!

There is nothing like adventuring with exciting and romantic heroines and heroes having myriad beneficent qualities and villains flaring up – terror and horror in the service of aesthetic enjoyment. Magically it all stays between the book covers, waiting in that space for us when we reluctantly leave only to get back to it.