Life in 3lbs.

Our friend has just been admiring Mothermouse’s book about life, a 3lb, A4, 1000 page tome about everything you need to know in your quest to understand this living business we’re all trying to do. As he flicked through it he was impressed with the clarity, the diagrams and the sound sense it made just as I was when I did the same. Mmmm, interesting we both thought. It was obviously written by someone with great insight, education and a wide awareness, with the added credibility of being based on a very old philosophy. There is nothing in its pages I could find fault with or disagreed with. It would thus be extremely churlish of me to then ask a very basic question. Why? I still don’t fully understand my motives. I mean I’d be the first to admit achieving a good life isn’t the easiest thing in the world so what can be wrong with a little 3lb help? I mean I’m happy to turn to my Haynes ‘Mercedes-Benz C-Class’ maintenance manual for help on tracing a leak in the heater matrix, which by the way, for those puzzling over why they keep drowning their front seat passengers, turned out to be a blocked windscreen drain pipe. So am I just male and out of touch with my emotions about anything more personable than a thermostat? No it’s not that. Then coffee table comes to mind. I know. I have trouble following my train of thought too; it’s not just you. It’s a coffee table book. That’s it! It’s like those equally large glorious technicolour books of the Yorkshire Dales that you dip into every once in a while to save yourself the trouble of going there. Dipping into it as our friend did it’s a refreshing reminder of what’s wonderful but used as a manual, which it purports to be, and the Yorkshire Dales will exist forever as just glorious technicolour pictures of how real life aught to be. So my churlish question is not about why it was written but about how it’s read. Stored under my coffee table for those long winter evenings, fine, as a manual for living, I couldn’t ever go there! My butterfly life would never stand the weight.