The Book

I think we did the poem “The Book” by Miller Williams last class, and since then I have thought about it quite a bit. One of the ideas I liked quite a bit was the thought that it was a person living in someone else skin rather than his own, or that he had become a different person. I felt the poem came from a war because the book was found in a fallen bunker. The part that revealed that he used it as a diary and a sketchbook means a lot. When a person uses something like that, they let their guard down and show who they really are. Finding out what that book really was―a book bound by human skin, and knowing what it held I think maybe made the soldier question himself and who he had become. The last lines describe it perfectly,“I stared at the changing book and a horror grew, I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is, how beautiful it was until I knew.” From that, there is that sense that the soldier is now lost, and he is questioning all that he thought he was and what he knew. Maybe that book allowed him to change and become a different person after the war, and then to find out that the place that his new self was, was not what he thought it was, it made him question his new self altogether. So, then the question comes would it have been better to have not found out at all? There is no clear answer, but I am not sure even what I would want? Find out my changed life is based on a something else from what I thought, I don’t know if I could overcome that? The book alone was not the only horror, the thought of where does he go from here only added even more to the overall horror…and that what was once beautiful and good was not anymore...