Not too long ago, I watched this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Many of you, I am sure, are familiar with this best-selling memoir of a woman who divorces her husband and travels through Italy, India and Indonesia to find herself. This book is so feel-good, so life-affirming, so empowering and sincere it almost feels like literary porn for women in their post-college lives. And I mean that in the best of ways. I really loved reading this book.

Anyway, regardless of whether or not you liked her book or even read her book, I still recommend anyone to watch her lecture. To boil this video into a nutshell, Elizabeth Gilbert asserts that we should all see creative genius as something we 'have' or 'tap into.' This is in opposition to the conventional idea that certain people 'are' geniuses, something fully integrated into their personal identities.

Under Elizabeth Gilbert's paradigm shift, we are humbled by the creativity that inspires us than becoming arrogant by it.

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"No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes forgetful in order to meet the demands of the things seen and the things being made." - Flannery O' Connor

I included this quote in one of my first blog posts two years ago, and I want to share it again. This is selfishly more for myself because as time passes, I want to remind myself how much this quotation makes more sense to me.

Instead of sleeping at a reasonable time, I found myself gulping down more chapters of Reading Lolita in Tehran. I promised that I would stop at one chapter, but then I kept going. When I finally forced myself to stop and put the book away, the ideas and the characters kept me awake.

When I find a book this engrossing, I find myself disappearing. I wish I could find a better way to describe it.

Maybe I'll just describe the mental image that I had last night:

A person is reading a book--and then, very slowly, the outline of her being disappears. Her physical existence taking up space in the room and her internal existence--her life history, her everyday problems, her most troubling insecurities--everything personal about her dissipates into the black words marching across the pages of the book. As the person completely disappears, the book she is holding appears to floats mid-air, and the pages seem to turn itself like a ghost is reading it.

This transcendence is possible because the reader of the book allows herself to temporarily un-exist for the levitation of the book, which now seems to inhale and exhale very slowly with every turn of the page. The book, now a living creature in its own right, unfolds itself to the world like a flower opening its petals for the first time ever.