Essays and Alternate Realities

 

I don't even remember when I got this book or why I thought it would be a good idea to read it. It stayed on my TV table for months, perhaps years, as I picked it up, flinched at the ponderous language, then put it down again, having scarcely read a page. 

I will get to it, I told myself, eventually. And once I have done so, I will charge on regardless of lures and seductions... 

I finally got to it. After the lightness of Ichigo Ichiee, I thought I am fortified; ready for this.

To be honest, the essays at the beginning were hard going. I disregarded my 50-page rule and read only one essay a day. It doesn't do to rush through essays. I tries to ponder his ideas, interesting enough, I guess, but none of them seemed to take hold.

It reminded me of the time when I was into labels (as in branches of philosophy and not product brands) and fancied myself a Transcendentalist and read Emerson's essays, and what's more, tortured my friends with the recounting of them. It is only in hindsight that I am aware of their affection for me, because, forsooth, I am a wearisome person.

But halfway through the book changed from essays to short stories and here I read with closer attention and greater enjoyment. 

Robert Louis Stevenson was once in Hawaii so he attempts to bring that diction, that way of thinking into some of his fiction. It is intensely poetic. 

The last few stories in this collection are strange and incoherent. They would be better read in a state of inebriation. Because then, they would make sense. 

I am glad I finished the book. 

But I don't think I would read it again.