Reading again at lunch.

Having finished the architecture exams, having finished Libeskind's book (3 1/2 stars), having no one scheduled to meet for lunch, I resumed a happy habit yesterday of reading at lunch. The weather's gloomy, and the park is far away, but I found a corner in the back of the office that was quiet. I picked up Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, with its bookmark in the high 200's, and started diving in again.

And, with a book like this (not disimilar from Joyce's Ullysses in mass), "diving" is the right word. The "story" is so massive, so omnipresent, so existential and overtly narrative; the paragraphs are so enormous, that I find myself swimming in the words, foating in the middle of sentences, pondering the author's intent, wondering about the realities of life in america, comparing them to the proposed realities of life in russia, pondering faith and fiction. It's not as if my months away from the book leave me detached from the characters: in fact, I feel in many ways that I relate to them better, in a real-time sense, as if the characters have been living their lives as I have been living mine, and now we get back together for an hour at lunch.

To say I go back to work then, refreshed, may be an exageration. I did read about a duel yesterday, and that was exciting, until the dueler apologized and became a monk. I could do that - work feels more often like a duel.