Jan 16, 2010

I ask myself continuously if I’ll ever be content with the material I read; so much material and so little time. I think of myself as someone who prioritizes according to my immediate interests, but I’m devising a way to concentrate on one topic a month, eventually hitting the age of 90 and realizing I will likely need 90 more years. Yesterday I began reading Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a celebrated work capturing a continent’s tragic tale of second-hand status in the world. I’m 50 pages in and angry. It’s been ages since I’ve read any socio-political material about Latin America. Last non-fiction piece I read was Labyrinth of Solitude by Ocatvio Paz and I’m not entirely sure if I gained anything from it. I kept asking, “But how does this relate to my relationship with the world?” I asked myself the same question when gazing at these books: how will these help my relationship with the world? Maybe that’s the question to ask from now on.