After half an hour tunneled into an ebook on my phone, I looked up from the vivid pictures that had been soaking my perception. I’d been depicting experiences and places from my youth and from more recent revelations, that have been stirringly characterised in the book “Notes from an Exhibition” by Patrick Gale.
I looked up, to see the city park in a similar state to the scene in the novel, bright sun burning, radiating the park around me, colours bright, smells warm and breeze welcome. The novel was set on the remote coast, but my reading was in England’s Midlands, farthest away from any salty sea or Seven Stones stained beauty.
However, it reminded me, and caused me to recall the gaze experienced after a slow toot. In my younger daze, I guess the world was so sharp and rich, that to conduct a plain of wonder that we ached for, we needed to blur the edges with whatever alternative might have worked, and the occasional rolled riz made the world a more vibrant kingdom. Now much older and arguably wizened, I have responsibilities that call for sharpness and attention to detail at a moment’s notice, alas any such sedati-stimulants are carefully considered and rarely imbibed.
As I looked up from the opiate of the novel, my gaze evoked a similar vivid daze, tunneled on the middle distance and detached from the ‘real’. Possibly the novel’s topic of heat, sea, childhood and the creative mind, had lured me in. I don’t know, but I do recall similar experiences reading some other books invoking contrasting worlds and so… it’s to the well crafted “fable” that I raise “regards”!
The good fable can be a powerful conductor if you want to brighten the often sterile world around us, have a toot on a good book! it works for me, sometimes.
Jules P Richards 