The road to freedom

Thoughts comes with the impressions I get from other people, or from the books I read. Last book has been Nelson Mandela, The road to freedom.

I'm not going for a review of the book, but something I've been thinking about if I am able to really get it.

It has been a long time since I've read a biography like this, and my initial thoughts was that the style was not very good. Still I was taken in a way that I couldn't put the book away. It troubled me and I wondered what made me see things that way.
I knew I was unjust, the book is not ment to give any fictional thrill. It's an incredible, true and corrages fight that has been fought by so many men and woman. Many not even there to see or experience the freedom they lost their life for.
I needed to start to think what the book was, then I could start to get some of the book.
What I missed is something a person walking a road so far from myself might not be able to give me. See, I couldn't put my finger on what it was... When reading I felt something missing. But when reading the end I finaly cought what it was.
I miss the person, I can not feel or see the man behind. Even though he really shares his fights, thoughts and family.
Except from in the end... here I can read a bit more of the man. I actually think I should have read that part first to keep it with me through the book. Ofcource a man that has lived for a people and not himself is intiteled not to give into his deepest secrets. It is not secrets in that way I miss. When you read a book it often captures an essence of the auther (at least I feel that). Espescially when the auther is a man like this, I would really like to find that man in his writing.

So, to my thoughts... My last sentence capptures it. Is it not a man? He has done incredible things, but as he himself once say in the book (this is not his excaxt words, but close); "It might be that it takes terrible times to get people like this out", when talking about all the incredible people that have faught for the same freedom he fights.

Is me "not seeing him" caused by that I expect to see something it is not in man to have?
It can also be that by having such an easy life I can't get further in reading this book than I did, I just don't have the clearness to be able to see? I could say many things about the book or the man, but everything got lost when I read the end (in a good way)... I'm thinking that getting older gives other thoughts, so when beeing younger there was to much hardship to ever try to think more then one goal. If not for other reasons it must be for the reason that having a clear goal and cause must quiet down other aspects of your self. If you are to stop, feel or think to much about things not directly connected to the goal. How are you to be able to truly fight, truly belive in the good in people (as is an aspect in this book) ?
If the road is hard you need to have a goal and focus on that. For what ever happens or grows besides your path you can not stop because it would keep you from your goal? How strong is not a man that can keep this path when knowing so many die and never get to see that same goal ? This is one goal that one can not say to be happy with half way (or happy with the moon when reaching for the stars!)

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
Voltaire

From reading this I have moved on to Stephen King's Talisman, that was a really strange shift =)