minalisms

I’ve started reading books again. I recently emerged from a span of eight or nine years when I didn’t want, didn’t care to read for pleasure. I have been ashamed of that period; it made me feel stupid, shallow.

But I’m back at it, and it’s gems like the following (from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”) that remind me why I must read:

It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough — but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”