Before or After?

As I sat at the table this morning, savoring those few moments when the house remained at rest and all was quiet, I realized that mid-August has crept upon me far too quickly, and I have been far too laid-back in my approach to reaching a few goals concerning this house and the planned move to another.  It is probably a good thing that I always worked well under a deadline.  Once again, however, I may be scarce, or not.  

I did however, clear my mind of all the things I had missed writing about, that I intended to share but didn't quite manage.  The past is the past and I shall not dredge it up except as if plays a role in the present or the immediate future.  And this in itself is liberating.

But of course the past cannot be completely forgotten.  For example, when I went down to Knoxville a few weeks ago, I took a book to read on the plane.  I looked at other books in the airport at Newark but did not buy anything, assuming, incorrecctly, that I could buy a book at the Knoxville airport should the need arise.  This proved to be a mistake because the book I took was not long enough to get me through two 2-hour flights plus a 1 hour delay, and I was left with over an hour to kill in flight with nothing to read.  

But what was that book?  And how does it affect the present?  The book was The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.   I forgot that it follows Oryx and Crake, which I had not read.  This didn't particularly bother me.  I loved the book and felt it worked well on its own, although I did pick up on the presence of Oryx and Crake in the background, and Jimmy/Snowman, who I didn't even realize was a character in the former book.  But I did realize that it might serve me well to read Oryx and Crake and then perhaps reread The Year of The Flood.  

Of course the problem is that I can never go back to The Year of the Flood and read it as if I hadn't read it first.  And I am no longer looking at Oryx and Crake with unjaundiced eyes.  Rather than seeing Flood as the story of minor characters in Oryx, I immediately recognize characters that were minor in Flood, and think of this as fleshing out a different story.  How we read a book depends heavily on what we have read before and how our own experiences and life affects the way we react to the words on the page.  Although I try to read each book separately, without comparison to other works, a work that is written in a series necessarily makes this more difficult.  Reading the work outside of the order in which it was written or intended can completely change the perception of the thing.

I am not far into Oryx and Crake at this point, having started it only last night.   But I can already see that I am going to be looking at a world from two overlapping but entirely different perspetives, and I am intrigued.  In many ways this is a gift, an opportunity to explore two views of the same world, in an order that I would not have encountered had I kept up with my reading list.  It is rare that we are able to remind ourselves that what we see is only a fragment of reality viewed through a broken lens. As I see this now, these stolen moments of reading over the next few weeks promise a rich reward, perhaps made richer than they would have been had I started reading the books in the intended order.