Existential Crisis # 23,452

All right – finished painting the master bedroom ceiling last night around 9 pm.  Took a nice, long, hot shower to remove all the sweat and paint and aches and pains (painting a ceiling sentences muscles I hardly use to a severe workout).  Slipped into a nice clean shirt and shorts, drank a nice cool glass of water, went into Patch’s vacant room with her nice powerful AC cranking, stretched out, pulled over the covers, and opened my nice new book. 

After reading six pages of Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World, I cried out – no one is in the house but me all week, mind you – I cried out: “This is just Tolkien redux!”  In the past four years I’ve re-read The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings (twice), The Hobbit, and even, for the first time, The Children of Hurin.  Seeing how thick Jordan’s epic is, a sudden cold hollowness made its presence felt in the pit of my stomach.  No, I could not read Eye of the World; at least, not now, not yet.  No, I could not spend an entire month on the thing.  The older and busier I get – and both seem to go hand-in-hand – the more precious free time becomes to me.  I could not squander twenty or so hours on this … thing.

I went down two flights to the writing desk and the stacks and stacks of books on the shelf behind it.  I selected another book I’d long been pondering.  A Western, and every summer the past few years I get a hankerin’ to read about the West, the Frontier, where one lived by the sweat of one’s brow, where fists and brains kept you and yours alive in a brutal, fickle world.  Life was simpler, and harsher, but somehow more authentic than the wage slavery me and millions like me are sentenced to in today’s world.  So I brought it back upstairs with me, and cracked open and read the first couple of pages of A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky.

“Ach!” I cried out to the empty room.  “I cannae read this!”  (Somehow I had adopted a Scottish accent.)  The hero of the novel just beat up his pa – a pre-emptive beating, it must be noted, since pa was about to whip the hero’s hide for gettin’ drunk – and left his pa in the rain and split the log cabin in Kentucky for points out West – No!  This didn’t feel right either.  Not the time for it; needs to ferment a bit more on the bookshelf in the basement.

How about something spiritual?  Something uplifting?  Pope John Paul II has just recently been declared a saint.  I have George Weigel’s Witness to Hope, Karol Wotyla’s official biography, on the shelf for more than a decade.  Twice I’ve cracked its 900 pages, one time getting as far in as page 119 (the bookmark was still there marking my farthest advance).  I seized it off the shelf, trudged back up two flights to Patch’s empty room, hopped in bed and read.  And five or six pages in, I realized, to the dread and existential angst bubbling up within me, I realized that tonight there would be no quality or quantity reading to sooth my roiling, paint-scarred soul.

Woe is I!  What am I to read next?!?