Thoughts on "Ender's Game"

It's finished, ended. The last line has been read. The last five pages have been read and reread five times.

People ask "What do I think?".

And the best answer I can give is the following: As I closed the book, I couldn't speak. My mouth opened, the sounds came out, but I wasn't speaking. No thoughts had been conveyed. I couldn't do anything but think and reread the last pages. I didn't understand but everything in me said I should. I walked downstairs and made a poor attempt at doing something. No music was right, no audio book fit. I wanted to reread the book, but I knew I couldn't. I searched for The Man Who Was Thursday audiobook and clicked to listen to the first chapter. It didn't load; deep down inside, I was glad. I cleaned my bathroom in silence and thoughts. I read the introduction and my silence was doubled. The more I rolled it over in my head, the more I didn't understand and the more I felt like I wanted to. I reread the last pages and thought.

As the book wrote the story and I read, it was as if music had started and as the story continued, the music wrapped itself around me and I became lost. Not a part of it, but lost. Like my body no longer existed. Like breathe and thought and feeling were as foreign a feeling to me as life is to the dead. I wasn't in myself; I was outside of it - whatever "I" was. And when I finished the book, the music played on and on, but more melodies joined in: The Man Who Was Thursday, Bellwether, The Matrix, I and Thou, Porphyria's Lover. And still it plays inside of me and I know neither what to say or what to think. It wasn't writing I read; it was a story I felt. And not feel as in feelings, but feel as in thoughts. Something went beyond feelings. It went beyond the heart and touched the soul. I felt so young, but ancient, like I had lived many lives.

I didn't relate to Andrew (Ender). He was too brilliant for me, too obedient. No, it was Peter and Valentine that I looked at and saw myself. Peter, the monster who was a monster because he loved in a very twisted and perverted way. He loved himself through abusing the ones he loved. He loved his hate and his wretchedness. As twisted as it seems, I saw myself in him more than Andrew. And yet I was Valentine, the one who followed the one she did not love and betrayed the one she did. Valentine, the manipulator of words, who used it to an end she did not see or desire, who let herself be a tool and hated herself for it. She hated her love for making her into a tool and yet she loved all the same. And even though Andrew was suppose to be the medium between Valentine and Peter, I found myself in them, not in him. And yet...

"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."
"So stay."
"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."

The book writes and I read. And, honestly, I don't understand it, but somehow my soul seems to search on. It will go back to the story again and again, reading and rereading like it did for The Man Who Was Thursday, like it did for Bellwether, like it did for I and Thou, searching on and on for something, something it doesn't cognitively know and doesn't verbally understand...


"And always....looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time."


Perhaps there isn't an end. Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps the point is the search.