Michael Louis Hedley

I was thinking of Cicero this morning as I looked out across the water via the porthole window in my room, with a number of books on the shelf in front of it, and remembered what he said once. 'A room without books is like a body without a soul.'

I was having a meander through notes I've written to myself over the last few years and I happened upon this today which has resonated with me again more so since I have been moving around from place to place without any fixed abode. It's from John Banville's book The Blue Guitar which I had read. 'And yet once you go away, and stay away for any length of time, you never entirely return... even when I came back here, to the place I started out from and where I should have felt the strongest sense of being myself, something, some flickering, yet intrinsic part of me, was lacking. It was as if I had left my shadow behind. (page 198)

I like to have a few books on the go at the same time. Always a novel, then as well, perhaps some autobiography and something challenging and uplifting, not that a novel cannot be all of those things. Any way over the years I've been delighted when a new Haruki Murakami book has landed on the shelves, so I was happy to buy his latest hefty work some 681 pages called Killing Commendatore. Take a journey into his engaging, challenging (there that word), edgy and uncomfortable world and be drawn along as I have been. A thoroughly delicious read with much to ponder, he  always offers an opportunity to suspend belief and soar with it. One sentence that has lingered with me since I finished it the other day. Towards the end the narrator, who is never named, states baldly and boldly- 'We all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose.'

I was flicking through some notes I have in search of a lost thought when I came across this gem by Levi Asler (1. 4. 05. -I know!) Reading is confrontation. At the end of a good book you may decide to change your life, and a reader or writer is somebody for whom that possibility is always open. This is why a person who discovers a great work of literature (or music or art or any other form of creative expression) often appears for the moment like a crazed animal twitching and mumbling incomprehensibly. Don't talk to this person... give them time... they are emerging from some cocoon right now and you are an unwelcome witness. Trying to think of the last piece of creative expression that affected me thus.

The ferryman said. The sun is shining and the sea is calm. I don't often have the chance to put those two thoughts together in one sentence.'   Just finished a lovely book 'Lost Connections by Johann Hari' It's a book that addresses depression in a way that looks at all manner of disconnections in people's lives. You don't have to be suffering from depression to benefit from reading it. I reckon it offers a wonderful proactive guide to avoiding depression all together as well as helping people to break free of it. At the end of the Chapter on being disconnected from other people there's a lovely final paragraph which touched me and I'd like to share it with you today. 'Sitting in the middle of Amish country, Freeman Lee told me he knew he would seem strange to me. "I understand how you guys would look at it," he said. "But our thought is- you can have a little bit of heaven here on earth, if you interact with other people....