[xylokopos]

Not ashamed as such - I have accumulated enough shame through other activities without having to drag reading or not reading books into it - but I am vaguely haunted by the only two books I started and never finished: Kafka's The Castle and St. Augustine's Confessions.

I recall reading the first forty or so pages of The Castle. I certainly did not decide to stop reading because I was not enjoying the experience. Before that, I had read In the Penal Colony in some horror anthology or other while I was still a teenager and I had loved it. I then borrowed The Metamorphosis from my best friend and read that. It is possible I was still at school when I first read The Trial. I loved reading Kafka then as I do now. So, why could I not finish The Castle? Was it that I was called for military service? Did I leave the country and forget about it for years? Did my copy get misplaced? And why have I never found the time or the opportunity to finish the damn thing? It is incomprehensible.

The Confessions I read, or tried to read, when I was a bit older, still though in my early twenties. I recall the fantastic copy I had, a black leather-bound edition with extraordinary typeface, in Greek, published by some specialty publisher of Church History and the Early Fathers. I remember that I was fascinated with St. Augustine's recollections of a sinful past as if it belonged to another, since he, now devoted to virtue, recollected with phenomenal detachment. I thought I would explore that idea, perhaps write something about it and then...nothing. I have a vague and possible false memory that I stopped reading the Confessions in order to read Feyerabend's Autobiography and never picked it up again. I have stood holding a copy of the Confessions in many bookstores since, but somehow I have never found the capacity to purchase a copy.

Something subliminal and evil is at work here!