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A review by aurora410
Prayer for the Living by Ben Okri
5.0
“True love can only come after disenchantment. The first enchantment is a madness and fragility the madness of a fool, and the fragility of a spring flower. The second enchantment is as slow as the growth of a great tree and deeper than the ocean, but get to the second enchantment, one must survive the desert and the fire. One must grow a new heart for the first heart dies with the disenchantment.”
“ you have not understood the power of your dreams or the gift of your obstacles,” the stranger said, a dark gleam in his eyes. If fate shuts the door on you, it is because it wants you to find a greater one. The normal door you want to pass through is not for you. Every obstacle presents us with a magical solution.”
“Christian Rose kreutz, pair of calipers, Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus, ancient cooy of Fama Fraternitatis”
“we are how we are because of how others are,” she said quietly.
“that’s hard to understand.”
“It’s very simple. I am how I am because of how you are mutually we create our reality each person, even though we love suppresses some aspect of ourselves .”
“is that a law or an observation?”
“You will find that it is true here.”
“ Let it be said, while I have breath that he made us more imaginative just by being himself. I’ve never felt myself more locked in the little box of my possibilities then, in the presence of that man, he was a call to greatness. We failed to take up that challenge cowards that most of us are that failure is the lingering regret of my life. For a life passes, a life is lived. It is lived under fear and caution one thinks of one’s family. One thinks of oneself, but the life passes. And it is only the fires that your life lights in other peoples souls that count. This I know, now in the long uneventful autumn of my life there are some people one should never have met because they introduce into your heart and eternal regret for the greater life you did not live.”
“ in the course of a 52 reading career I have experimented with 322 modes of reading. I have read speedily like a bright young fool, crabbily like a teacher, querulously like a scholar wistfully like a traveler and punctiliously like a lawyer. I have read selectively like a politician, comparatively like a critic contemptuously like a tyrant, glancing Lee, like a journalist competitively, like an author laboriously like an aristocrat. I have read critically like an archaeologist microscopically like a scientist, reverentially like the blind indirectly like a poet like a peasant I have read carefully like a composer attentively like a schoolboy hurriedly like a shaman magically I have read in every single possible way there is a reading you can’t read the number and variety of books. I have read without a compendium of ways of reading.
I have read books backwards and inside out. I began reading Ovid in the middle and then to the end and then from the beginning I once read every other sentence of a book I knew well and then went back and read the sentences I missed out. We are all children in the art of reading. We assume there’s only one way to read a book, but a book read in a new way becomes a new book.
And you have the nerve to tell me I am reading too slowly part of the trouble with our world my snooty young friend is that the art of reading is almost dead reading is the secret of life. We read the world poorly because we read poorly. everything is reading the world is the way you read it as we read so we are you are trying to read me now.
You are even trying to read this moment in time, but you read it dimly the words are not clear on the pages of your life youth clouds. You’re seeing emotions pass in front of the text before you have grasp it. Can you read yourself in the chapter of time? You are a living paragraph of history around you are all the horrors of time and all the wonders of life, but all you see is an old man reading with all his soul. Do you know what I am reading?
I don’t read slowly and I have long ago left reading fast to those who will continuously misunderstand everything around them. I read now the way the dead read. I read with the soles of my feet. I read with my beard. I read with the secret ventricles of my heart. I read with all my suffering joys intuitions all my love all the beatings I have received all the injustices I haven’t ordered. I read with all the magic that sleeps through the cracks in the air. Do you therefore dare to judge the way I read?
You would prefer me to gulp words down like a drunk guzzling palm wine in a Booka? I suppose you think the faster you read the more intelligent you are? I suppose for you living fast as genius. I bet you fuck fast too fuck so fast that the poor woman has hardly had time to notice that you were inside her.
What you don’t understand he said relentlessly is that nothing is done faster than when it is done. Well, you read for information. I read extract. The soul of the conception reading is like entering the mind of the gods seeing beyond the page. Can you read an entire history from a single glance? Can you deduce a poets health or the station of their time here on earth from a single line of their poetry? Do you think reading is about reading fast but reading is about understanding that which cannot be understood which the words merely hint at.”
“ before we had seen the world as somehow inevitable. We had seen that it was the only way it could be now with the new reading we saw that the world was only one of 1000 ways it could be. But we had chosen this one with its bad smells it’s injustice.”
“ you have not understood the power of your dreams or the gift of your obstacles,” the stranger said, a dark gleam in his eyes. If fate shuts the door on you, it is because it wants you to find a greater one. The normal door you want to pass through is not for you. Every obstacle presents us with a magical solution.”
“Christian Rose kreutz, pair of calipers, Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus, ancient cooy of Fama Fraternitatis”
“we are how we are because of how others are,” she said quietly.
“that’s hard to understand.”
“It’s very simple. I am how I am because of how you are mutually we create our reality each person, even though we love suppresses some aspect of ourselves .”
“is that a law or an observation?”
“You will find that it is true here.”
“ Let it be said, while I have breath that he made us more imaginative just by being himself. I’ve never felt myself more locked in the little box of my possibilities then, in the presence of that man, he was a call to greatness. We failed to take up that challenge cowards that most of us are that failure is the lingering regret of my life. For a life passes, a life is lived. It is lived under fear and caution one thinks of one’s family. One thinks of oneself, but the life passes. And it is only the fires that your life lights in other peoples souls that count. This I know, now in the long uneventful autumn of my life there are some people one should never have met because they introduce into your heart and eternal regret for the greater life you did not live.”
“ in the course of a 52 reading career I have experimented with 322 modes of reading. I have read speedily like a bright young fool, crabbily like a teacher, querulously like a scholar wistfully like a traveler and punctiliously like a lawyer. I have read selectively like a politician, comparatively like a critic contemptuously like a tyrant, glancing Lee, like a journalist competitively, like an author laboriously like an aristocrat. I have read critically like an archaeologist microscopically like a scientist, reverentially like the blind indirectly like a poet like a peasant I have read carefully like a composer attentively like a schoolboy hurriedly like a shaman magically I have read in every single possible way there is a reading you can’t read the number and variety of books. I have read without a compendium of ways of reading.
I have read books backwards and inside out. I began reading Ovid in the middle and then to the end and then from the beginning I once read every other sentence of a book I knew well and then went back and read the sentences I missed out. We are all children in the art of reading. We assume there’s only one way to read a book, but a book read in a new way becomes a new book.
And you have the nerve to tell me I am reading too slowly part of the trouble with our world my snooty young friend is that the art of reading is almost dead reading is the secret of life. We read the world poorly because we read poorly. everything is reading the world is the way you read it as we read so we are you are trying to read me now.
You are even trying to read this moment in time, but you read it dimly the words are not clear on the pages of your life youth clouds. You’re seeing emotions pass in front of the text before you have grasp it. Can you read yourself in the chapter of time? You are a living paragraph of history around you are all the horrors of time and all the wonders of life, but all you see is an old man reading with all his soul. Do you know what I am reading?
I don’t read slowly and I have long ago left reading fast to those who will continuously misunderstand everything around them. I read now the way the dead read. I read with the soles of my feet. I read with my beard. I read with the secret ventricles of my heart. I read with all my suffering joys intuitions all my love all the beatings I have received all the injustices I haven’t ordered. I read with all the magic that sleeps through the cracks in the air. Do you therefore dare to judge the way I read?
You would prefer me to gulp words down like a drunk guzzling palm wine in a Booka? I suppose you think the faster you read the more intelligent you are? I suppose for you living fast as genius. I bet you fuck fast too fuck so fast that the poor woman has hardly had time to notice that you were inside her.
What you don’t understand he said relentlessly is that nothing is done faster than when it is done. Well, you read for information. I read extract. The soul of the conception reading is like entering the mind of the gods seeing beyond the page. Can you read an entire history from a single glance? Can you deduce a poets health or the station of their time here on earth from a single line of their poetry? Do you think reading is about reading fast but reading is about understanding that which cannot be understood which the words merely hint at.”
“ before we had seen the world as somehow inevitable. We had seen that it was the only way it could be now with the new reading we saw that the world was only one of 1000 ways it could be. But we had chosen this one with its bad smells it’s injustice.”