Otherwhere
I’ve been thinking about reading and why. Some books (even jolly ones) are teaching texts — history, philosophy. Grand thoughts. Information. Revelations. Some are connectors — an author writes about something that a reader has also experienced and thus community is created, the writer and reader and other readers, together, sharing the experience of reading about something experience they shared.
But the books I most often reach for are portals. I read to be somewhere else, with people having adventures, exceeding expectations, uncovering mysteries, spiraling inexorably to satisfactory conclusions. This has always been true, from as early as I can remember. I read Oz, Narnia, Little House, Little Women, the Meledys, the Dark is Rising series, Perelandra. I read about Pippi and about the Great Brain and about Ramona and Harriet and Adam of the Road. I read about children opening doors, falling down holes, whirling away in hurricanes, escaping.
Every so often I probe why I still choose these books and books like them. Oh I read other books, worthy books that I would not be embarassed to discuss over supper, but it’s a little like eating broccoli. I eat it (read it) not so much because I like it but because I’m an adult and I know it’s good for me. (That’s potentially a misrepresentation because I could hardly be pried away from a biography of John Adams recently and I’m a sucker for readable science but it’s fundamentally true.) So pop-psychology might say that I read Discworld or Harry Potter because I’m not comfortable with the nitty gritty of real life, but I don’t find that an entirely satisfying answer. I do know that while I don’t (and never did) have a teddy bear, I have a terrible time falling asleep unless there’s a book beside me. And I don’t like starting fresh books at night. I like to return to a place I know before I sleep. Books are the blanket I wrap myself in.
I suspect — or more accurately, I fear — that I read so I don’t have to do. In that way, writing here has been good for me. Not only do I have to live my life, but I ask myself almost daily to examine it for a few moments. A few moments of facing the light without holding up a book to shade my eyes.
I think its good that you get that escapism . . . better books than drugs, right?
It’s funny . . . I’m studying book publishing now and everyone I go to classes with just loves fiction the way you do . . .except for me. I don’t care for a lot of fiction. I’m mostly a non-fiction reader. I guess I feel like if I’m going to sit down and read . . . I might as well learn something from it.
I love reading. What about Roald Dahl? Ah, great fun.
I absorb ways of feeling and thinking from novels of all sorts (and the occasional memoir or biography). If I don’t write, I keep those thoughts and feelings to myself, which I suppose is not a crime, and yet keeps me from connecting with others. I think that was my initial draw to books in my childhood – the escapism involved in reading. But in forcing oneself to then write in between reading bouts is a difficult but necessary thing for truly examining yourself, as well as communicating with others. Facing the light, as you say.
No matter how often I have to defend it over dinner, I maintain that you never fully own your experience until you give it a name. Reading, especially reading fantasy/youth fiction–so many new analogies and made-up words–helps me stretch my experiential vocabulary in a completely different direction from the stretch that comes with reading Sartre. More words, more names, more subtle thinking. Everybody wins, right?
Blimey SM, give yerself a break! From the list of things you had to do the other day, you deserve, no, you need to read. It should be no-ones’ business but your own what it is, (I read the most mind numbing pap – crime thrillers, mostly, when I have time). There’s nothing wrong with escapism; why is it we spend our time encouraging our children to read wonderful tales and then feel we have to deny ourselves the same pleasure as we (allegedly) ‘grow up’? Oh dear, I’ve started to rant, can you see the spittle forming?
I get what you are saying. When I was ten, I sat down with ‘The Bastille’ in order to impress my parents and get me into the swanky advanced reading class, where children were encouraged to act out stories of magic and adventure, rather than reading silently like the ‘average’ class. This paradox is amusing and tale-telling (a pune?). I have read Bonhoeffer and Plato, John Stuart Mill and Descartes, and other ‘stock’ philosophers and theologians. I read ‘The Nation’ fervently.
But when it is time to drift and dream, I immerse myself in those classics…Narnia, Oz, and otherwheres. Because the true philosophy behind those books is innocence over worldliness, and bravery over compromise.
We all need our Otherwheres.