New Year's Resolutions

I love to read. It’s like searching for treasure.

When you read, you eventually discover, and roll around for a few milliseconds, in the cleverness or brilliance you must humbly admit that you, yourself, are lacking. That moment when you identify with what’s being said, yet realize you could never have come up with the words as brilliantly as the author has – well, that is the reason we continue turning the pages. Year after year. After year.

Volume after volume, I go in search of words so wittily strung together as to stroke and tickle my intellect while the author, counting on my superb intellect for his own success, assures me I am among his favored few. The few who truly “get” him. (My delusions make me happy.)

To me, writing is truly great if the author’s words are lost on a good number of people – but are there for me to relish because I am who I am. Forget that there are millions of brilliant minds who join my ranks and relish as well; I shall never encounter most of them and those I do encounter are counted among my finest of friends, my soulmates.

Having said all that for you now in three different ways (in order that you might grasp at least one of the three without taking note of my redundancy), I share with you a sentence I discovered this morning. It so delighted my fancy that I promptly set the book aside to make this ludicrous entry in my blog, that I might savor it time and time again.

(Moreover, todays ramblings work well under the heading of “new year’s resolutions” – and I am as likely to ponder changes for the coming year as much as the next guy, especially if the change requires only a new way of thinking and not actual physical exertion or some disciplinary commitment that won’t make it into mid-January.)

So here is today’s find: “After losing his hair, and Pat, Uncle Charlie had given up on sustained happiness—career, wife, kids—and was trying only for short bursts of joy. Any worry, any prudent thought, which interfered with his bursts of joy, he ignored.”

Ignoring all but the short bursts of joy, I wish you a year free of worry and prudent thought.

And now back to my treasure hunt in the pages of “The Tender Bar,” a memoir by J. R. Moehringer.