The False Azure of the Windowpane

Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?

Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.

That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.