The View from the Cheap Seats By Neil Gaiman

The blurb by Caitlin Moran says, “If this book came to you during a despairing night, by dawn you would believe in ideas and hope and humans again”. There is no better way to describe this book.

I don’t remember when I started reading this book. I believe it was around the mid of 2021 and I received a used copy of this book from Amazon. All the pages had that brown-yellowish tinge without any signs of perusal. It reminded me of the fate of my personal copy of American Gods and my vain attempts in getting through that book. I was expecting a similar fate with this one as well, but surprisingly for me, this collection of personal essays became my happy pill as soon as I started reading it. The love and warmth with which Gaiman writes about everything, I mean literally anything under the sun, is awe-inspiring.

One of the perks of moving back home and having an independent house is that I finally got the chance to try everything that I wanted to try for a long time. This included gardening, composting and even cooking. The process of worms decomposing the kitchen waste was fascinating to me even though I could not quite point out what is it in that process that grounds me. Gaiman gave me the words for that. Over time everything rots down and transform into something that has an entire life of its own. It is the never-ending process of life giving way to life.

“And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.

Myths are compost.”

I know that I would probably never get to read any of the authors or listen to all the albums/musicians or visit the places he mentioned in this book. But it is enough for me to know that art will survive despite every struggle that plagues this planet. And that’s a relief!

In all this gushing about Gaiman, I must confess one thing. I haven’t read Sandman or American Gods or anything that usual Gaiman fans gush about. But at the same time, I am a huge fan of his essays and even his occasional poetry. Maybe someday I will learn to fully appreciate Gaiman for what he is truly great at. But for now, I am happy with the non-fiction that brings a ray of sunshine to my rather hopeless days.