For some reason I have this incredibly longing for my childhood loves. Not people, my books. I want Prydain and Anne and Narnia and the Murrays and all my stories. I think that it might have something to do with the fact that it's snowing, and that I just want to wrap up in a feather blanket and regress for a while. I miss them. I miss how simple the stories were, and how happy. They had their darknesses, of course, but there was this feeling of utter joy at the base of them that never really went away. Reading them wasn't about being consumed. It was about flying. But it wasn't really escapism. Or maybe it was. I was certainly escaping school, but I feel like in reading them I was actually throwing myself into life as opposed to out of it. School wasn't life. School was the little death that brought total oblivion. Books were life, and reading them was living the internal life.

Either way, I miss reading like that. I still read all the time, of course, but things are more complicated in the stories that I find myslef reading now, and that flying-joy-exhilaration-feeling is almost entirely gone.