“Read and remember the complete book, not just a section or the end.”
— Brad Lafferty to Ken Foreman, discussing Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote
I once had that skill. I had complete books and movies committed to memory. Age, chemo, and senility all contributed to eat away my ability to remember the complete text and context of a quote, scene, film, or book.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Umberto Eco, Dan Simmons, Haruki Murakami, and Robert Pirsig are all among my favorite authors.
The other day, I was discussing Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali in a book group, and I felt like my friend and I were discussing two very different books.
In the book, Dan Simmons writes that sometimes belief systems are “Orthogonal and Opposite” each other. Why Kali was worshipped as both creator and destroyer is so poorly understood by Americans and Europeans despite the Judeo-Christian God both creating the Earth and repeatedly bringing about disasters on those who failed to believe or reveled in sin.
So I’m re-reading the novel this weekend, and discovering that we are BOTH correct. I understood the novel as an angry treatise on faith, my friend understood it as a novel about self-discovery and understanding the nature of our anger & rage for self-betterment.
In the end, I think my friend understood the novel better than I did. So I’m re-reading it now and appreciating it with a new understanding.