A Brief Transformation

I love books. I wander into quirky little bookstores, lose myself in late-night reading binges, find inspiration and wisdom and adventure. Today I realized just why I love books. Books make things beautiful. Oftentimes I miss the meaning in my own life until I write it down, because the very act of doing so lends every event significance and character. Even ugly, painful, or sad things become beautiful in books.
I am on what is perhaps one of the greatest adventures of my life right now, spending five and a half months living in Ireland. I have dreamed of this for years. Yet dreams and adventures are full of a surprising number of mundane matters and frustrating obstacles, like the phone company that ripped me off and the two hours I spent in phone stores when I would otherwise have been out "adventuring" in the uncommonly sunny Irish autumn afternoon. On the verge of tears and mourning my wasted Euros I suddenly noticed a bookstore I had unknowingly bypassed several times, and went right in. I asked the man working there what his favorite books were, bought two of them, and emerged to find Dublin transformed. Once more the cobblestone streets beckoned, the old brick and stone buildings hinted at the centuries of history they have silently witnessed, and the rare treat of a blue sky promised something wonderful.


Dublin was magical and romantic in all its bustle and I wandered over to St. Stephen's Green, strolled by the pubs as the streetlights started to come on, and wondered what Dublin had in store for me. Just the very act of going into a bookstore, and the faith in literature that brought me there, gave me newer and happier eyes with which to see Dublin. If my afternoon were written down, it would sound quite romantic: walking on Grafton Street, dropping coins for the street musicians, listening to the Garda man ring a bell to notify people that Stephen's Green was closing for the evening... if written it would all be a dreamy haze of quickly glimpsed and blended details, and it would all be there for a reason. I guess that's what is wonderful about books- everything is there for a reason. If my life were a book those few wasted Euros at Vodafone would be significant, would be set in the context of some sort of personal transformation or set of dramatic events or portrait of life in a city. Books make the ordinary a work of art, and just enjoying the presence of a few books turned a frustrating afternoon into several hours of romantic dreaming in a faraway land I had finally reached.

And then I had to try and get that damn new SIM card working... "real life" jars like the unpredictable, jerky Dublin buses. But I've written them down, those buses, and they are now characters in my beautiful story of life in Dublin.