Hunger
I’ve been putting of reading for days, and instead turned to writing. Slowly realizing I have no talent for that exercise, but I write nonetheless. The distance is finally great enough to make it fiction, not truth. Old fiction became truth, but has been removed.
But about reading .. I feel it is my duty to read great books that the great people read. Such as Hunger. A never ending book, about hunger. Hunger over and over. Then a loaf of bread. Then hunger again. Some cheese. Then hunger. So I gave up, and felt bad about it, considering Hamsuns a Nobel laureate. There has to be reason.
Trying to decide whether to pick the book up, I take Paul Auster’s Collected Poems off my bookshelf and select a poem at random;
"A word, unearthed
for Knut Hamsun
kneaded
on the blood trail back
from America, where the sun-
stoked locomotive roof
baked the consumption
out of him:
with so much distance
to be delved by what is
purely godless, the written
does not damn you
to any fate
worse than self.
You hunger
up the vast bread slopes of feeling,
and begin, breaking once again, your fathomless
alphabet of stones".
