A Stranger to Ourselves – Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us – by Rachel Aviv.
I opened the door and welcomed the girls in. I had clutched in my hands the book , A Stranger to Ourselves – Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us – by Rachel Aviv.
The daughter and her friend had completely different greetings – but the tones were likable enough, and I smiled broadly.
“So, whatchu reading now?”
“Ooh! That sounds heavy Aunty!”
I told them.
This book outlines the lives of six different people across different cultures and timelines, and their struggle with mental health.
Given all of our advances in health, mental health still has a long way to go. The unseen frontiers of the power of our minds, the terrifying depths to which it can plumb us, the giddying heights to which it can make us soar, the ruts from which no tow truck could extricate us – they are all true.
We chatted about this-and-that and other book recommendations.
“Oh Aunty! You should totally read Piranesi!” said the daughter’s friend, her eyes widening when she realized that I’d taken her suggestion and read a teenage angst novel. “You like mythology – well, I don’t want to give too much away – but you’ll like it.”
Piranesi – By Suzanna Clark
Piranesi is a book that I found vague and disconcerting in the beginning. Then, a book I wondered about long after I’d finished reading it. What did it mean exactly? The premise is that a person is stuck in an alternate reality – a large palace-like place with corridors lined with statues, flooding basements where the ocean tides creep in, and large, open spaces in which to ponder life about. But that is it. There are no other creatures – save a visiting raven or two – and one other person called the ‘Other’.
How to make sense of a reality like that?
I read these two books together a few months earlier. I had them jotted down somewhere to be written about. Given the flurry of posts and things to write about, I thought I would leave these out.
But I found that I couldn’t.
For these books both lodged themselves for different reasons.
Piranesi makes one think of all the palaces we construct in our minds – which ones are escapable from? Which ones serve as prisons?
Stranger to Ourselves makes one wonder about what a narrow path normalcy is.
“I think, therefore I am.”
– Rene Descartes
The next time I saw the girls together, I asked them what they thought of the books, and we went on to have an inspired discussion on how our thoughts shape our reality and so on.
Books References:
- Piranesi – Suzanne Clark &
- Strangers to ourselves – Unsettled Minds and the Stories that make us – Rachel Aviv
Nourish-n-Cherish 