Berlin, January 13, 1996

It is strange when you dive into a book, carefully with a tender line of graphite coming from your pencil marking the most valid nurturing strings of words, it feels a little bit as if you would explore part of the author's brain in a certain period of life. While you are touching through the labyrinth of the writer's mind suddenly some of its corners fitting to what you are able to perceive at the phase of your life, the creator's thoughts get to be connected with different associations of yours and it feel as if you were exploring a different world although you might have read the same book a couple of years or even decades earlier. I read the Glassbeadgame seventeen years ago in one of these phases were I lived in books. I wanted to cry whenever a book was finished, because I'd become so engaged with the hero of the book that I didn't want to leave him. I came home from school, already reading while I was walking my way home, not seeing the ground beneath my feet and the only very unwelcome interruptions would be caused by others. Even if my mother asked me how the hero of my book was doing, it would throw me out of my world for a second, destroy some of this sensitive net that I was spinning around me and I reacted like a snail escaping further back and deeper into my shell. Speaking then was too much of a connection to the other world that interfered with the one I was living in. While washing the dishes or doing anything manually I would retell the story in my head, being full of tension and expectation how the story I gained subsistence through, would continue. From the sentences I'd start and knot a thread of a different spun story and even when I had to take a break to sleep because my eyes were falling into the darkness fighting for a little rest I'd proceed building everythought further in my dreams. Now my brain feels sometimes overloaded and I digest much slower, of course when I read it feels like another intensity.

Anyway my room is clean which meant that I organized my brain a little bit in order to make space for new thoughts and stories to be absorbed.