He had me at Oscar Wilde the title pretty much.
Published author 
Such was my breathlessly intense, and evidently unhealthy, understanding of literature as an impressionable, voracious teenager. I read to get drunk and, to paraphrase Baudelaire, hoped to stay that way. A clutch of slim volumes altered my intellectual landscape and, at the risk of melodrama, saved my life.
Personally, Oscar Wilde was the second author whom I blame for falling in love with books, after Stephen King whose oeuvre I had read aged 15 already. I had already devoured all children books in the local library at a young age, including the whole The Famous Five before I moved on to adult books around 13 or 14.
But it wasn't until I saw Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest performed by a Flemish experimental teather troop that I truly connected with literature and my reading intensified. Intensified beyond the level of reading because reading was fun. This was amplified few months later only when I got to see Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
Lababidi and I seem to share a similar trajectory, also the age around which we truly fell in love with literature.
By donning a mask of brilliant wit, Wilde seemed to have split himself in two and outdistanced his pain. This was a trick worth learning, my sixteen-year-old self intuited wordlessly, as was his apparently effortless knack for pithy summary. “I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful,” Wilde would go on to say in “De Profundis” (which I devoured shortly afterward, along with all his immodest utterances, in various genres).
Do Profundis, obviously being another Wilde master piece which can not be not read.
I may never possess Michael Gambon's flair or charm, but the library he has in "Layer Cake" is the benchmark - Photo via IMdb
Maybe, despite considering myself a digital nomad who sadly struggles maintaining a physical library because of my nomadic nature, maybe the time has come to finally settle down and make that own, two floors high at least, library a truth.
Head over to
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