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Flow lightly, life that does not even feel itself, a silent, supple stream beneath forgotten trees! Flow softly, soul that does not know itself, a murmur hidden from view by great fallen branches! Flow vainly, aimlessly, consciousness conscious of nothing, a vague, distant glimmer through leafy clearings, with no known source or destination. Flow on, flow on and leave me to forget!

Flow smoothly, book that does not realize its influence, supple prose poem with ignitions of profundity. Read slowly, reader who wishes never to see it end.

One cannot read this book of fragmentary thoughts as quickly as one would others, for instead of plot or story, one finds style and syntax that reveal the human condition and psyche. So I read this one intentionally, wishing it would go on and on. Our protagonist and “voice� is that that of the solitary and observant older man, a writer who has never known the affections of childhood because he lost both his parents at a young age. What it must feel like to be loved, to feel the warmth of a mother’s hug, he ponders. He has never been in love, nor has he had any friends. In fact, he’s never had ambition, only his imagination and dreams:

Between myself and life there have always been panes of opaque glass, undetectable to me by sight or touch; I never actually lived life according to a plan, I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, my dream began in my will, my goal was always the first fiction of what I never was.

It is said that we learn more about life when we write, that we find ourselves within our prose (especially memoir writers). As I write this, I understand more about myself, and as I read his words, I realize that he and I are nothing alike, and yet we have so much in common:

I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself and, in the unleashed chain of images, I make myself king, as children do, with a crown of made from a sheet of newspaper or, in finding rhythms in mere strings of words, I garland myself, as madmen do, with dried flowers that in my dreams still live.

This is the beauty of poignant prose, when we find pieces of ourselves within it. Someone should have given me this book years ago, when I was a teenager in a new country, recovering from war and struggling to find myself in a new world of structured freedom. Back then, I was living in tedium, as the narrator puts it. My new world was invigorating, yet scary, this idea that I could walk the streets freely (and not have to keep myself secluded from men and guns), that I could attend public high schools and apply for federal aid for college, that I could go to a library and read any book—better yet, buy books freely and form my very own library? Although this was great, it was also painful, to be faced with the realization that this world had existed even while I'd been in a different world of imprisonment. I never knew how to verbalize that pain until now:

The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others� injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us�

To live in tedium is to die while still being alive, even while believing in staying alive: "Life chills me. My existence is all damp caves and dark catacombs." To live in tedium is to hope for a second chance at life, where one can do the things one has always imagined doing. This is the core expression of this book, I believe, this art of mastering self-consciousness. The book is a solemn but necessary read, this is why I’ve recommended it to my students who are war survivors and to my veteran students who have just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is also why I would recommend it to anyone who is frustrated by, yet still fascinated with this thing called life.

These pages are the doodles of my intellectual consciousness of myself. I set them down in a torpor of feeling, like a cat in the sun, and re-read them at times with a dull, belated pang, as if remembering something I had always previously forgotten.