Simon: I take it you've read 'The Marriage of Cadmus and
Harmony'.
No I haven't read Roberto Calasso yet. I did take it from
the library last year, but didn't get to it before it was
overdue. (Right now I'm on vacation in the countryside, and
books are harder to get here. Interlibrary loan did net me
Taylor's _Sources of the Self_ yesterday, after a long
wait--a first edition hardback that feels as though it's
been visited by many readers. So if I want to try Calasso's
mythic magnum opus, it will take me weeks to get it.)
Do you believe in "book destiny"? I'm not sure if there's a
better term for it. Let me try to explain "book destiny."
A friend tells you about book X. It sounds interesting but
doesn't fit with what you're reading at the moment. Weeks
later you read an essay that mentions book X favorably en
passant. Have to read that some time, you think. Weeks after
that, you are walking down Saint Marks and see book X in the
bargain shelf outside East Village Books, marked down to
$2.50. You buy it and take it home, where it sits on a pile
of unread books for months. It's never quite the book you
want to read...not quite yet. You pack up your books and
move, unpack them, and put book X on a new shelf in a new
apartment. No, not yet. Life goes through its motions and
one day you take book X down and start it. You read 200
pages in a sitting. It's perfect! You can't read anything
else until you finish it. You wonder why you didn't read
book X earlier--such a great book, and it was there, all
this time, waiting for you to read it.
The book was waiting for you to become its reader. It called
to you and prepared you to read it, and patiently waited for
you to become its reader--to accept the destiny of being the
book's reader. And when the student was ready, the teacher
appeared. Book destiny.
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