one of my favorite things...

sound: locusts on a muggy August day, and of course, a diesel engine

sight: looking out over a soybean field or a field gone wild at dusk and seeing the fireflies calling to one another.

thing: reading.

an excerpt from the neverending story by michael gnde translated from german by ralph manheim.

Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grownups. Those affected by them can't explain them, and those who haven't known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice everything for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people.

Bastian Balthazar Bux's passion was books.

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger--

If you have never read under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lam on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early--

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless--

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

Staring at the title of the book, he turned hot and cold, cold and hot. Here was just what he had dreamed of, what he had longed for ever since the passion for books had taken hold of him: A story that never ended! The book of books!

He had to have this book--at any price....

In a twinkling, before h knew it, he had the book under his coat and was hugging it with both arms.

later on in the same chapter...

Bastian looked at the book.

'I wonder,' he said to himself, ' what's in a book while it's closed. Oh, I know it's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventures and deeds and battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea, or it takes you to strange cities and countries. All those things are somehow shut up in a book. Of course you have to read it to find out. But it's already there, that's the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.'

Suddenly an almost festive mood came over him.

He settled himself, picked up the book, opened it to the first page and began to read

THE NEVERENDING STORY.

Posted by hill at March 4, 2004 09:27 AM