Why I Read Books

3/17/2006




Literature gives us permission to be real in a society where the only realness valued is reality television. Literature allows us to be raw when we are supposed to be airbrushed. We can be harsh, crude, crass, rough, or violent- emotions it is not prudent to display towards the real world. One makes love to literature or one rapes it. There is a fine line between coaxing meaning out and just ripping away what we desire, but the line exists nonetheless. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to feel so strongly while reading.

The “Walter Mitty” world can get very tiresome. It kills off the passionate side of our soul, and leaves us feeling disconcerted and bare. When something comes along that awakens that piece of us again, we jump at the opportunity to be real. We are so eager to feel in a society that is numb. Books encourage this, and readers understand this.

Last weekend, I spent Saturday in bed with Pride and Prejudice. It is a book one must caress softly and speak gently to, as Austen does not throw her prose out generously. And when the story is ready, it unfolds magnificently, grasping us. I read each page twice, slowly, savoring the moment, indulging myself in what is beauty at its purest. A woman and a man that weren’t willing to settle. It is a romantic’s story, certainly, but it is also a lover’s story. I think Casanova would have appreciated the long, drawn-out verbal seduction of both Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. And isn’t that what literature is- seduction of the mind? It captivates, cruelly and intensely, holding us against the wall until we finally take from it what we must.

The power of human emotion is a major concept in Beloved. Sethe’s guilt manifested in the succubus of Beloved, Denver’s love for her mother ousted Beloved, and Beloved’s loneliness was part of the reason she infested the house in the first place. The footprints in the riverbed stand for many things, but at the root level, these footprints are guilt. Anyone that steps in them understands- the footprints mold, the story changes, the water changes its course. But when finally stepping out of the footprints, the prints disappear- disremembered. Beloved taught me that it is okay to disremember once the past has been dug up and reburied. Just knowing that it is okay to reify the past was something I needed to hear before I consumed myself with the past.

Books satiate our senses in a way that even other people cannot. Our mother, best friend, or lover sometimes cannot understand the depth of our feelings and the realness of our experience. Pain- more so than joy or anger- is unyielding. And it is pain that usually sends us running for our bookshelves, trying to locate the pages that will explain our own emotion to us. I read once that people find the books they need. I always do. Even when I am not sure what I am feeling, there is a book that knows. This is not escapism of the real world, but rather living in it even more completely. Books give us- or me, at least- an explanation, a reason, a cause… something. Something more.

Oftentimes the characters we fall in love with are searching for the same thing we are- importance, a deeper meaning, an understanding of a life that is not easy to understand. Emma Bovary, too, relished prose and lived her mental and emotional life through the literature she pored over. But in Emma’s quest for enlightenment, she only further deludes herself. I try to read for clarity, but I know that I too delude myself. I find myself believing that I am going to have a Mr. Darcy, or a Rochester, or a life-changing affair. At the end of the chapter- more often the end of the night- I wake up and leave the passion I crave buried somewhere in the sheets. Madame Bovary could not do this, and her inability to accept life for what it really was ended up as her demise. Literature exists as a means to acceptance of the world; it is a boiled-down version of our society that helps us make sense of life.

To take the words of Arnold, “In the sea of life enisled, with echoing straits between us thrown, dotting the shoreless watery wild, we mortal millions live alone.”
From Lady Chatterley to Madame Bovary to Kurtz and Marlow to you and me, we are all asking the same question: what shores of what worlds? This is the question of your life. What shores will you live on and how will you live? It is a deeply personal quest; it is the quest. When Jung and Campbell talked about the hero journey; well, this is it.

A River Runs Through It defined my shores. I can pinpoint the exact moment, where I was sitting, what words I was reading. I’ll never forget- “Sometimes it is those we live with, and love, and should know that elude us.” The brevity--or maybe it was the poetry--of Maclean somehow made my whole life come together. The people that had been falling away from me, and the fact that I had been falling away from myself… suddenly I understood why it was happening. Suddenly it didn’t matter that those closest to me were suddenly farther away than ever; all that mattered was that I loved them and that we were there. Being there is good enough sometimes. Admitting that we will never understand is good enough sometimes too. I find a strange sort of comfort in not knowing, in blackness, in blindness.

Loneliness, pain, love- they are all so much more bearable and meaningful when something is next to you, when something is in your soul. Books give me this. Literature has taught me what school, parents, and relationships never could—how to question deeply, how to make every decision count, and how to derive my own shores.