My photo is tilting and that's a little disturbing. But it's ok. I'm on leave today and I'm feeling anxious and imbalanced. So the supposed rest is turning out to be a little disturbing, but I'll try to make it work.
I picked up Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things at the Cheng San library yesterday. Because I really need some fiction, or rather, good story-telling to make me feel alive. Sat at the kopitiam a few hours ago, tucked into my prata for lunch, and read the introduction as I sipped on my hot teh through a straw (to prevent staining of me two front teeth and the kopi auntie remembered again! great woman!).
Fragile Things is a collection of short stories, and Neil Gaiman gamely writes about the background and inspiration behind the various stories. So interesting. I always find it very enlightening reading the weird/shocking/wonderful concepts that authors, whether for literature or music, toss and turn in their heads before penning them down as a finished product.
He writes:
If you're one of the people who doesn't like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it's nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it's interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don't have to read either.
Haha.
But, back to fragile things...
He writes (and I use only extracts):
...it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are...the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles able to pump for a lifetime...Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.
And he goes on to say the same of stories.
Fragile things are indeed peculiar. Just like you and me.
