Sunday

Last Thursday, during a brief happy hour at Heritage India on Connecticut Avenue, I laid my book on an auxiliary bar to finish my ginger mojito. When I walked out of the restaurant minutes later, I left it there. For all I know, it sits there still. Maybe this story doesn't end. Maybe it actually starts in August, when I first began reading Of Human Bondage.* Since then, I struggled well beyond the halfway mark in the enormous volume. Maybe the story starts a couple of weeks ago when both covers of this poor book were ripped clean off jostling around in Sunshine's bag. It's a tough book to read: dry, tedious, meandering; though sporadically quite enjoyable and often acutely salient. I was hoping to finish it before I flew to Vietnam. I was proud that I'd read hundreds and hundreds of pages already. Maybe, it was suggested, I should feel relieved to be rid of the thing. But that would mean I might have to read the first half again someday. Without covers, it really wasn't worth retrieving last week's book all the way from Dupont Circle. So Sunshine bought me a nice, hefty replacement copy of ...Human Bondage at the book store today prior to our nice Indian lunch. This week's volume is heavier than the old one, and about fifteen pages longer. Since I also lost my bookmark, it took me a couple of minutes to find my place again. In today's volume, because of rather comprehensive introductory materials, I was no longer halfway through the book. It'll take me days to get there again. Reading it, the slimmer portion again in my left hand, I cannot help imagining that, quantum mechanically, this is exactly what it must be like to read a black hole. [Cavin]