Reading

I love to read. Even just the thought of performing the act excites me down to my very core. The plain, but endearing, black and white text I read enraptures me with its carefully crafted simile and metaphor, the characters are so beautifully formed and molded throughout the many pages, and it spoils me with grand and descriptive imagery. The imagery is my favorite part of any book, it is as though the author is crafting entire worlds within the confines of a couple of pages. As though each word were a single brick that lays the foundation for a grand monument of creativity. As I enter into those hallowed halls I have become fully engrossed in this book, so much so that I barely realize that it is a book any more. I see the setting as a real place, the characters are real people that I may converse and live with. This world is no longer an escape, it is reality.

Unfortunately, like all things, books must end. The monument must crumble down as the oil painting of what I once believed to be reality melts away into a blank canvas. With the final page, then the final paragraph, then lastly- and most painfully-the final word, I am transported back to the real world.

In the real world the backgrounds are more solid than oil paintings, but are more plain and uninspiring. Everything still seems to be black and white, just as the pages are when I look up from the book. Yet unlike the black and white text that convinced me that it was anything but, all I can see is stark white and empty black that fills my vision. The color only seems to exist, ironically, within the confines of those two cardboard covers that hold tens to hundreds of pages of black text on white paper.

The way that color is described in books makes it seem otherworldly, something that I could never comprehend. The rich clearness of the blue sky which holds the sharp brightness of the yellow sun shining down onto the plush softness of the green grass that is connected to the dependable solidness of the brown earth. Yet when I imagine this supposedly fictional place I realize that those are all things that lay within the strict confines of reality. It only takes the right words to make something you’re looking at novelistic. The deep royal purple hue is dyed within the woven fibers of the material that clings to my form, which is covered in a multitude of spots that range from putrescent yellow to a powdery white. I’ve just described an old t-shirt I’m wearing that’s covered in mustard and deodorant stains.

Most novels are only taking the world that we already know and putting it through the lens that the author chooses, whether it be rose-colored, smudged or warped. A novel seeks to show the world how the author or character views the world. The way Huck Finn describes the world as an explorative child in the deep South during the 1800s is bound to be different from the way Frankenstein’s monster, a disgusting monstrous mass that is in his own right a child during the 1800s, describes the world. That is why we like books, they describe the world that we are in but in a way that is pleasing to us, without ever letting on that they are describing the actual world around us.

The color begins to come back to my eyes as I recognize all the colors that I’ve found in books. Bright fuchsias and oceanic teals explode into the once black and white surroundings around me, like bombs being dropped around my room. These colors are real, they are not just some authorial creation. I can see the shiny mahogany of my desk that reflects the light shining from the fuzzy violet lampshade that stands upon my dusty turquoise nightstand. This is the grand and descriptive imagery of my room, which houses the beautifully formed and crafted character that is myself inside the novel that is my life.