a story of two books; or, how I found profundity through pure superficiality

1.You were lying on a side-table at my father’s house, closed, no sleeve. I was 8; the height of that little table, near the front door, put your title at eye-level. “What’s this book?”
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”

Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.


2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.

A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).