I’ve had it with light reading. Light music too. With any art that is merely pleasant.

            I report this curiously, not approvingly. I’d prefer not to feel this way. Why can’t I simply enjoy sweetness, pleasantness, a chuckle? There are many good-hearted books I’d like to smile with. Am I getting crabby in my seventies? (People do.) Why not, as more than one friend has urged, ease up?

            But what does “light reading” mean?

            Light reading, in my lexicon, means solely diverting, intended to amuse not explore, to pass the time not squeeze it. It does not mean sweet, jolly, tuneful. Many the ingratiating piece that presses past the pleasant to the profound. Handel and Mozart are particularly masters of this, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Dickens in literature. Their comedies couldn’t be more fun – then they ache.

            I didn’t use to be so demanding of my reading. Why not a “beach book,” as they used to be called, before dermatologists outlawed the sun?

            What’s changed is time. I’ve less each day, and I feel its leakage. Younger, I seemed to have lots – so what if I frittered some? These days, wasted time exasperates. I berate my profligacy.

            But what do I mean by “wasted time”?

            Waste, according to my beloved OED, connotes “uncultivated and uninhabited… incapable of habitation or cultivation; producing little or no vegetation; barren, desert…. profitless, serving no purpose, idle, vain.” But doesn’t calling time “wasted” imply its more profitable usage. What use of my time do I imagine would benefit mankind? Am I nuts?

            What I seek from art, from words especially, is understanding. By understanding I mean a deeper appreciation of the mystery of our shared adventure. The preceding sentence may sound like gobbledygook if you’ve never experienced it. Even to me, it sounds dangerously like vaporizing. Intense feelings defy explanation. Yet one strains to explain.

            Reason assures me life has no meaning. Here today, gone tomorrow – me, our species, the cosmos. Nothing lasts – and extinction erases significance. This seems irrefutable.

            Yet there’s another department in my consciousness that scoffs at such a conclusion. I know this earthly enterprise means something – but what “means something” means I can’t quite say. I know it the way one knows joy or sorrow or sexual excitation: my being quivers with the feeling. Reason’s inability to explain a feeling does not refute it.

            I fumble through my days in search of these thrills that suffuse me. That’s the vegetation, the profit, I seek. I gravitate toward makers who might kindle such fires and avoid any I might merely admire. Sometimes my own words surprise me with delight. Any activity that feels like trudging I shun, though sometimes radiance sneaks up on me unawares (in an airport, say, or supermarket checkout line).

            Each of us defines “wasted time” differently – but don’t we all have our definitions? Wasted time means not doing what we believe we “ought”.  One feels they ought to weed the garden, another that they ought to see a ballgame, another that they ought to phone a friend. Some people feel fulfilled polishing the silver. There is no right or wrong here, no better or worse, any sense of purpose is life’s lavish gift. The poorest folks aren’t those with the least money, but those with the least necessity.

            My insanity keeps me sane. I concede my quest for meaning is crazy and, oh, how it exhilarates. As fanatic fishermen dream of a gleaming catch, so do I of ah-hahs from murky depths. Writing is how I fish. I fail, of course – as here – but that’s the sport.