Reading Love

Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she's thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the further her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body's truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela's disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading - "Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle's essay on heroes" - her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind's authority without knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

 I just started Anne Michaels' second novel, The Winter Vault, today. I am not that far into it yet, but so far it is every bit as strikingly beautiful as Fugitive Pieces. I read Fugitive Pieces in one of my classes last semester and fell in love with Anne Michaels' writing. There were moments last semester where I profoundly struggled with the question of why I am doing what I'm doing with my life. It is writing like Anne Michaels' that reminds me of the answers to this question.

The above quote is one of many from Fugitive Pieces that float through my mind, haunting me, weighing on my very soul in the best way possible. So much of our class discussion of the novel centred around love; I even wrote my final paper on the connection between language and love in the novel. I find Jakob's description of Michaela as she reads incredibly beautiful. Perhaps this is partly because I too have a wandering body. I will stop reading only to find myself sitting in a chair at the coffee shop in one odd position or another and I always wonder if people have been looking at me. I think if someone watched me with Jakob's intensity, and with his deep affection, I would be won over. Now that I've written that I realize that it probably sounds weird. Oh well. What can I say? The way to my heart is through literature.