There was a time when I found relief in Wodehouse. It was a stressful time and Wodehouse's idyllic world was just so welcoming. I've always loved Wodehouse - still do - but that was for the humor (which really is far ahead of its time) but in that time, I would actually imagine myself as a Wodehouse character - facing no crisis greater than a displeased aunt or a stern uncle unwilling to lend you money to start an onion soup stall.
It vanished as suddenly as it started. Wodehouse went back to being my go-to guy for laughs. And I find myself a little bemused by the recollection that I actually lost myself in that frankly unbelievable space. It was pretty much life saving too! On Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 9:03 AM Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com> wrote: > A thought: It's fascinating how much our response to art (to anything > really, but art in particular, because it requires so much subjectivity to > process) is influenced by our context at the time. > > Random musing, on reading a book in the Elantra series [1]. > > It is quite a competent example of its ilk (a mashup of sorts of the High > Fantasy and Urban Fantasy subgenres) but my response to it was coloured by > my recollections of the earlier books in the series, which I found quite > hallucinatory, due to the somewhat surreal events going on in my life at > the time. I had plunged into this series, and read 8 books of it back to > back, in an attempt to distract myself while spending a couple of weeks > camped out in a hospital keeping vigil for my dad, who was in a > stroke-related coma. > > Reading the latest piece of the series brought back a jumbled rush of > impressions. Very powerful. > > And now I am reminded of one of our departed members, Ramu Narayan, on a > similar topic [2]. > > Care to share any other experiences of this kind that you've had, folks? > > Udhay > > > [1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/40454-chronicles-of-elantra > [2] > https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/silk-list/conversations/messages/3455 > > -- > > ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) >
