I rediscovered reading and writing in my mid thirties. I had done nill to none with either for quite sometime. But slowly, I came to the realization, my education wasn't complete and that I was missing something. So I read. And read and read and wrote and wrote. I read greek and roman classics, medieval romances, current fiction, new nonfiction as I had rediscovered a lost world. There was something about going back and rereading certain books, that now having more experience, I understood in a completely different light.
Reading for me has become a quiet protest against the way things are tending. Politics and religion have become so commercialized to the point I find very little that inspires me currently with these two in modern culture. So I started my own mini-revolution which I secretly and personally dubbed 'backwards now', and set my sights on the historic, the, yes I know, romanticized past.
You may read genre fiction, a good science fiction book or the latest mystery novel. Maybe by doing so, you too are silently protesting this current state of things and are escaping to other worlds in order to entertain yourself and even inform yourself, experiencing your own personal enlightenment where experience doesn't necessarily have to prop up the facts.
Whimsys, flights of fancy, dreams, animal imaginations, all these can be just as valid cognitions as logical thinking where the silent protest is concerned.
You may be a closet heretic keeping your mouth shut in hopes you won't be discovered and be burnt at the stake (or worse, ostracized). You may espouse the views of Ann Coulter while enjoying reading 'Living History', or conversely espouse the views of Al Sharpton even as you read from a pile of Edmund Burke's works.
Either way about it, you may be silently protesting like me.
Soldier on, comrade, I say. We'll know when our moment has arrived!
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