Raamatuklubindus

Täna kohtus me väike Berkeley tuttavatest koosnev raamatuklubi teist korda. Esimene raamat, mida lugesime, oli Jhumpa Lahiri "Namesake", teine Cheryl Strayed'i "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail". Ma ei hakka neid raamatuid siin pikalt tutvustama, aga üldistavalt võib öelda, et mõlemad olid lugemist väärt. Mõlemast raamatust on vändatud ka film ja kumbagi neist filmidest ma pole veel näinud. Mis on hea, sest ma eelistangi enne filmi nägemist kõigepealt raamatut lugeda. Seda võib küll öelda, et "Wild''i" lugemine sujus kuidagi paremini, raamat oli köitvam ja dünaamilisem ning kuigi seal on kajastatud mitmeid kurbi sündmuseid, ei anna need raamatule läbivat traagilist ja rõhuvat nooti, nagu see mulle tundus "Namesake'i" puhul. Samuti on "Wild" mulle isiklikult huvitav lugemine, kuna Pacific Crest Trail on minus juba varem huvi tekitanud. Tegemist on Mehhiko piirist Kanada piirini mööda mäeahelikke kulgeva üle 4000 km pika matkarajaga.

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

“It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

“Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

“Perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant that I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”