There is a serendipitous feel to the air when I pick up my battered, second-hand copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. £1.99, the sticker says on the back, bringing with it the smell of old ladies and must that seems to lurk in charity shops. It has been gathering dust in the corner of a bookcase for years and then its final resting place became a dark box where it sat, waiting and biding its time until it could burrow itself into the recesses of my imagination. Now, it is finally time for it come alive again…
I am at a crossroads in my life, with an infinite number of paths spread out before me, some clear and others, many others, hazy. Change is a healthy thing, a fact that has been hard for me to always accept, but when it comes to my life in books, I am embracing the change with an immeasurable ferocity.
I have come to the realisation that books are no longer the escape that they once were for me. Instead of balking from this like I thought I would, I have leaned closer to it and tried to understand the change, and here it is: Books offer an infinitesimal number of opportunities, experience and advice that hasn’t been fully open to me until now. My mind is constantly evolving and stretching to keep up with an ever-moving life, and books now work alongside it to further stretch and evolve it. Each word imprints on my soul, colliding and eventually interweaving with it, whereas before they sung to the beat of my heart, a slow and aching timbre. Each syllable is still an escape, but also a progression. A step along the path of my existence.
This theory clawed at my consciousness and came to fruition through the sudden discovery of The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood, Plath’s protagonist, entranced me from the first page and called to me in a way that no character had since Holden Caulfield. Where 13 year old Lucy adored Holden because he held the key to unlocked feelings, Esther spoke to current day Lucy’s every movement. With each intake of breath, Esther echoed with an exhalation of emotions; with each flick of a page, Esther responded with an urgency to keep flicking and keep turning until the events had been memorised with a fierce protection. I had tied myself to Esther Greenwood, a character with whom I felt my own fate was connected.
And now I am reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and it is awakening a primal call from deep within me to write. And to live. And to experience. It is happening all over again, a cycle of letters morphing into words into phrases into an entire world formed in the lobes occupying my brain that pushes to expand and fill more empty space.
The power of books really is greater than simply the physical touch of paper held between uniquely crafted fingerprints and the flurry of eyelashes to cram in sentences.
Books are pure magic.
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