Somehow when I was at home, surrounded by shelves full of read and unread books, I had lost my taste for reading. Maybe it was too much effort to choose something to read. Maybe it was easier to watch What Not to Wear on TLC or Kathy Griffin´s My Life on the D-List. But now that I´m here with no literature to read save Whitman, I´m dying for my unread or partially read books. Any of them. I would gladly dive in to one of the short story or short short story anthologies, or a collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, or the 2006 Best American Non-Required Reading, or a book of poetry, or several books at once: bring ´em on! Why O Why didn´t I bring more books with me?! Partly because I didn´t expect them to be so expensive here. And partly because I hadn´t really felt like reading anything but candy (e.g. Terry Pratchett novels) for quite some time. But at this moment I would give a nut for a good book to read. Like a brazil nut or even a walnut.
A couple of passages from verse 33 of Whitman´s "Song of Myself" that caught my particular attention:
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
***
Not a mutineer walks handcuff´d to jail but I am handcuff´d to him and walk by his side.
(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)
Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
My face is ash-color´d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.
Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.
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