catapult magazine

An open letter to literature

by Amy Carpenter Leugs

For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.
- Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway

This is my love letter to all the books.  You know who you are.  Some of you I’ve read again and again.  Your covers are torn and taped, and I can turn to any page within you and sink into your story within a few words of reading.  Some of you I’ve never met – we may or may not have a future together, lingering over coffee, stealing bits of time together in waiting rooms.  Or I will watch you with others in those coffee shops and waiting rooms, and I will wonder. 

Some of you I’ve heard of, from friends who have loved you.  I may resist you now, but then, resistance and refusal are common in matters of love, too.

You know me.  I read you for the same reasons that Clarissa Dalloway walks the streets of London on a fresh morning in June.  For the love of life, the love of story, the crush of it all together down into the unknown jewel at my center that that turns its facets this way and that.

I didn’t always know that this is why I read you.  I have journeyed through other reasons – I have even been to the desert place where I came very close to hating you.  All of these places were beautiful in their own way – your essence was always there, in one form or another.

In elementary school, I believed all of you to be manuals for life – problematic in the 1970s, when the didactic messages that adults wanted to pass down to children were all over the spectrum.  While Marlo Thomas told my generation that we were Free to Be, there were older writings with beautiful dark covers to assure us that children who were too free and too wild suffered horrible fates.  I kept careful mental notes on all of it, sure that someday you would yield enough of the puzzle pieces to show me exactly what I was supposed to do in every single possible situation.  I was sure that if I could approach you with the right understanding, you had the power to keep me safe and right and knowledgeable about the ways of this vast and overwhelming world in which I had found myself.

When confronted with a story like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, I was at a loss.  Instead of accepting Max’s journey to the land of the Wild Things as a dream, a compensation, a safe way to work out a child’s desire to simply “be a monster” for a while, I tried doggedly to apply my logic.  It never occurred to me that Max was dreaming or fantasizing.  After all, the pictures showed his room morphing into jungle and ocean, and my dreams never did that.  Who was right and who was wrong – with which side would I align myself?  Dears, I looked to you and you looked back, enigmatic and silent.  I would have to work harder than that to unlock your mysteries.

Later, I read because I majored in English in college.  I became an English teacher and a sometimes writer.  I read for literary reasons, for cultural reasons, because reading the best of your lot is good for the mind and useful in many circles.  I was never completely competent at these reasons, though I believed them deeply.  I owe a special apology to Moby Dick, which was only the worst of the casualties of my English major phase.  I wrote an A- paper on the image of whiteness in Melville’s masterpiece, and I could not read the thing.  (I’ve since read your first chapter, Ishmael, and thoroughly enjoyed the humor.)  Gorged on lofty literary expectations, I simply couldn’t take another bite without heaving.

This was our darkest night, dears.  You were still with me, the same presence you had always been.  But I was different.  Still, I had built an identity around you, and we tried to struggle on. 

As in a failing marriage, those who suffered most may have been the children.  As an English teacher and as a parent, I forced myself, dragging and despondent, to read books to children, because you are good for them.  Are there more adults in the world today who hate and fear you because I passed on that dreary undercurrent to children who would feel it but could not put their little nail-bitten fingers on it?  I will always wonder.

I’m sorry to say that I began to hate you, dears.  Or maybe not you in particular, but the mythos built up around you.  Whereas before I had denigrated television and video games (practically a prerequisite for English majors and book lovers), my need to step away from your scribblings allowed me to look more closely at these fast-moving pixilated ways to tell stories.  I could see my children’s enjoyment of them more clearly. 

Did you know that the culture of our educational institutions has a rather indiscriminate worship of you?  (You respond to the question with your usual silence.)  Child advocate Sandra Dodd puts it this way:

There was a time when the only way for a kid to get information from outside his home and neighborhood was books.  (Think Abraham Lincoln, log cabin in the woods, far from centers of learning.)  Now books tend to be outdated, and Google is better for information. If Abraham Lincoln had full-color DVDs of the sights of other countries, of people speaking in their native accents and languages, and of history, he would have shoved those books aside and watched those videos.

Adults who think books to be a superior way of learning will criticize a child for staring at the TV for hours, not moving, oblivious to the happenings around them – and yet those same adults will stare at one of you for hours, not moving, oblivious to the happenings around them.  Perhaps it is stories in general that weave a spell and reach into some inner space. 

(And still you look back at me, enigmatic and silent.)

In the paradoxical way of a fairy tale, my hatred of you was what allowed me to begin to love you again.  The desert stripped me clean of an identity that revolved around you.  I could finally see you anew.

Still, for a long time I saw nothing special in you.  I do not know when you began to vine your way into my ribcage again.  But at some point, I looked up from Mrs. Dalloway and realized that I was laughing, waist-deep in the waves of words, allowing the rhythms to hit me in the chest and face like the wind and waves of the ocean.  I realized that I was doing so simply for the experience of being hit by something bigger and deeper and truer than I.

I do not know how it happened.  I know only that by grace it has, and I can once again read stories and take my place among my fellow humans, for, as Helen Luke writes in “Inner Story:”

The essence of all religions, from the most primitive to the most highly developed, has always been expressed by the human soul in stories.  … We can say, ‘I believe in this or that,’ and assert the truth of many doctrines, but these things will not affect the soul of any one of us unless in some way we experience their meaning through intense response to the images conveyed in story. … Valuable as conceptual theory is, it can only speak to the intellectual faculties in men and women; whereas in a story the living confrontation of the opposites and the transcendent symbol that resolves conflict speak directly to the listener’s mind, heart and imagination in the same images.

And so here we are, dears.  It is something like our first meeting, when as a young child I sat, sleepy after my bath, between my mother and father.  I smelled the dish soap on her hands, the office and tobacco on his shirt.  The quilt we wrapped around us smelled of fresh cotton and furry cat.  I smelled you, ink and paper and possibility.  My two parents, young and strong as only their child could know them, took turns reading to me about a badger named Frances and her deep affection for bread and jam – and I knew, and you know, that loving bread and jam is some kind of badgers-and-children-only code for inexplicably loving life.

“For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh….” 

your comments

mgoodyear
Mar 13 2009
10:04 AM

“I’m sorry to say that I began to hate you, dears.”

I’ve been there. Once I burned out on reading so badly, that I stopped reading everything except magazines for nearly a year.

I rediscovered the joy of reading aloud. And most importantly, gave myself permission to never read another work of literature again. So long, Moby. So long, Hester Prynne.

Ivor
Mar 13 2009
10:30 AM

I was an avid reader of fiction and my textbooks when in college and of non-fiction classics later on. Nonetheless, ever since the Internet has entered my life, I find it difficult to spend days concentrating on a book, no matter how good or helpful it may be! I even read the Bible at Beliefnet. Is this peculiar to me, or is this a more widespread phenomenon? I would appreciate it if someone would shed some light on this topic!

nbierma
Mar 13 2009
02:28 PM

>> Did you know that the culture of our educational institutions has a rather indiscriminate worship of you?

So true! A sacrilege rarely spoken. Interesting, thanks for this.

Ivor
Mar 14 2009
09:57 AM

Yes, as per Sandra Dodd’s quote mentioned in the above article, maybe Information and Communication Technology or ICT, is going to replace raeding of books. School kids tend to read only that which can help them make the grades. On the other hand, it is true that human creative bend of mind only opens up by reading of classical and contemporary literature. Amy Carpenter Leugs is an English language teacher and so am I. I think it is pragmatic mindset of believing that only that what is useful is “good,” that has led us to this predicament! Being a member of many teacher’s associations, in schools they are trying to use ICT for teaching by use of white-boards etc. There may come a time when all books will be available at Google, but I for one, am still confused as to the good or bad of all this!

kirstin
Mar 16 2009
04:08 PM

Re: books vs. digital sources, I find that my body tells me that digital sources can’t be a complete replacement for the printed page: eye strain! Some days, after editing and e-mailing and researching and writing for hours, I just physically can’t sit down with a kindle or the like for relaxing reading.

arcarpenter
Mar 17 2009
12:11 PM

Yes, I took Sandra Dodd to mean this: people who think that for kids all TV is bad and all books are good are missing the possibilities of richness and imagery that both may offer.

I find white boards and digital books cold — with those media, it takes me longer to get into the imagery that’s available, longer to get into the feeling of what’s written. What people learn from is a real experience — the learning and the sensory experience are related. A real book is sensory in ways besides visual — it has a smell, a feel in my hands. A movie has sounds, pictures that may make my heart race. That’s all related to my experience of the story and imagery.

I think the educational book worship attitude doesn’t discern among these things very well. Sometimes it seems that anything written — even if it is cold or mediocre — has more school credibility than a rich and multi-layered and quirky video production of a story or concept. That seems to confuse the desire for students to read and read well (a skill) with a desire for them to truly experience the content and images and story.

Ivor
Mar 21 2009
01:43 PM

Eyestrain Kirstin? You my dear have hit the nail right on the head! By the kind courtesy of Google, I have many good books down loaded and saved, but even when I have to read a very long article, I prefer to take a print-out. And yes Madam, I agree that the audio-visual media seems to leave nothing to the imagination, so students may not be able to relate to it as they can to the written word! The question here is that how can we nurture interest in good books within a generation that reads it’s mail on iPods?