Just a bit more red.

How strange... I just walked into my room and expected to see the strand of colored Christmas lights and holly leaves around my window. I don't know why, but I was completely caught off guard when I didn't see it there. My mind is either six months ahead or six months behind... or maybe several years ahead, or, more likely, several years behind. I've been thinking about old things a lot lately. I've been thinking about the things in my room, because my room is the one thing that I can control, and how I'm bored with it and would like to re-decorate. Or at least move some furniture around - you know, maybe throw some of it out and get new and interesting stuff. Today I came up and looked around, telling myself that I would find one thing to throw away. A big thing, too, not just a pile of junk. I started with a little table by my rocking chair, then my rocking chair, then my nightstand. I don't play the keyboard much anymore, unless it's to tune my guitar by. I use my desk often, but could live without it. My bed would be missed, but eh. If I had to leave it, I would. Then I realized that the only things in my room that I would keep would be my bookshelf and a large black and white photograph of Paris in the 1930's that hangs above my desk. At first this realization made me feel excited - I can throw it all away! Then I realized that I would have an empty room if I did that, and that would look even worse. So now I'm stuck with all of this useless junk that I don't love or need. Funny: basic furniture now equals useless junk. This is me acting out against all of the clutter that has taken over our house.

I'm reading Everything is Illuminated, and though a large majority of it makes me laugh out loud, the rest of it breaks my heart. The chapters where he's talking about his great-great-etc.-grandmother, Brod, especially. I read this passage just now and it made me want to run out and find someone to read it to. But I couldn't think of anyone to go to. How sad is that?

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It's so terrible! I must write something that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn't it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew that she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the ideas of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

Strange how things that I read seem to relate to what I've been thinking about in the past few days. Or maybe I project my thoughts onto what I read. Maybe both. Strange how that happens, isn't it? Really good books, I think, can be taken to mean completely different things - not just from person to person, but from day to day and mood to mood. You find and identify the things that you've been thinking about. Realizations like this make me want to read every good book at least five times. One good book, read five times, could be like reading five completely different books. It's all limitless. Sometimes it blows my mind.