I clung to bed far longer than I should have this morning. So much to do before our trip, and once I woke, I couldn't get back to sleep, between people talking outside and fretting over a few things at work (which I should only slightly be fretting about, if at all). I realized last night, I have responsibility burn-out again, and it's making it really rough to think about going in to work (which I'm doing for eight days straight before vacation), and get things done. Finally dragging myself up and away from the nice cozy little cove of the boy's arms, I stumbled into the bathroom and picked up Dorian Gray, to read another page or two to cling to for the day.

On a previous reading of the book, I'd marked a small heart next to a description of the breaking dawn. I read that portion slowly, thinking the beauty of the words might help me find some motivation for the day. But as I kept reading... I could scarcely believe how perfectly the words on the page pinned down the lurking gloom in my soul the last few mornings. (I could read this book forever.)


      There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.

- from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde. (text snagged from Project Gutenberg)

Labels: art, books, life in general, navelgaze