Books, the arts and me

I wrote this on April 11th, 2009

When I was a child and a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, I thirsted for news of a wider world. Not the adult world of politics and responsibility but a world of ideas and sex and love and adventure. I searched for it in the right-wing newspapers, in the occasional arty film on the new tv channel, in the music press and in the music itself and most of all in books. Books on the narrow school curriculum, shabby paperbacks from even shabbier second hand shops, worn plastic-wrapped hardbacks in the local library. High literature from the past, texts of plays by Russians and Norwegians, or second-rate fiction with near-naked women on the cover. It didn't really matter. 

I found bits and pieces, hints and promises that life did not have to be like the dull future which seemed my destiny. I wanted something more than and different to that. Not that I could imagine anyone employing me or marrying me but these seemed the only future - a job and a husband. I was told often enough of my faults and my lack of ability.
But I was a good enough student at school, not obedient but interested. Physics experiments, French essays, the history of the Irish language, the Romantics, Bismarck, calculus - they all absorbed me in different ways and to different degrees. (It is satisfying now to think of how many of those interests, in different forms, still interest me.) 

But now I have the internet! Since my early thirties, I have been messing about online, finding more and more to read and watch and listen, almost drowning in words and images. I still feel the compulsion to seek out all the new things I can find... It chokes me sometimes. There is so much that I skip from site to site. No time or inclination for the close reading of a story which made my legs weak or the close listening to a song which made me gasp on the rare occasions I heard it on the radio. I am still the same child as I was in the 80s with the same thirst. But I am older and slower and there is so much to connect to still. I will never reach all that I yearn for. That saddens me and excites me.

Over two years on, most of this is still true. I am a bit more focused when I make myself focus, but I am still easily distracted by the internet and overwhelmed by all it opens up to me. But I am a bit more relaxed about it.