Midnight's Children

I've done a lot of reading during my first semester at Columbia, but very little of that has been actual literature. Yesterday marked a rather momentous occasion: I completed a novel (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) for the first time since October. Considering that I'd get through two novels a week in ideal conditions, this is a pretty drastic change. Still, however slowly I do it, I'm glad I have at least a little time (and inclination) to read something that is beautiful and meaningful in ways scholarship sometimes doesn't appreciate. Here is a quote from Midnight's Children in which Saleem, the protagonist, reflects on his life - a favorite quote from a favorite author (and no, those are not typos - that's Rushdie's gorgeous, jumbled style):

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus* of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

What a beautiful way to look at self-definition, which is often a challenge for those of us less gifted than Rushdie.

Next on the list: G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. With any luck I'll have it done by March or so.

*the population of India, Saleem's country, in the 1970's