The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

I’ve been daydreaming lately. Some say it’s healthy, others say it isn’t. All I know is that sometimes I just can’t help it. I’ve imagined myself in a wild new place, and like so many years ago, I imagine that I am hunting something whilst being hunted. I feel like I’m on the verge of something extraordinary within the confines of my life, and that my imminent move is the beginning of what is to be the greatest, and perhaps final, chapter of my life.

But who’s to be sure?

I read Eric’s words and become drunk with ideas. The imagery, sometimes subtle, sometimes startlingly blunt, is always a willing transport to not only a land in which I have never been, but a life that is as much like my own as it is different. I am both envious and ambivalent. I realized that as much as I enjoy reading him, I would not want to live his life.

In his older works, I feel a strain of myself there. In fact, when I first began reading him, I was convinced that he had picked up where I had left off so many years ago. Over time, he proved that he was different than I, gracefully so. But perhaps there are underlying similarities, perhaps certain crumbling edifices, which are protected and turned and turned away from the world. There definitely is something.

It almost seems that one would not read if a certain amount of relation could not be generated. Perhaps so many people are turned off from War and Peace simply because they cannot relate to the court life of 1800s Russia. Or maybe it’s because of its notoriety. Or, more realistically, maybe it’s because the book is 1,400 pages long.

But then again, how many other people have read The Stand?

Soon, I will be transplanted, and I hope it will be for the last time. I feel that my destiny is calling me and I would be criminal not to answer with all my voice.