BOOKS
Like so many of the other books I read, it never
seemed to me like a book but like a place
I had lived in, had visited and would visit again,
just as all the people in them -
were more real than the real people I knew.
-Anna Quindlen
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
-Longfellow
There is a book by former Hoboken, New Jersey resident and Pulitzer prize winner Anna Quindlen called "How Reading Changed My Life". I believe Anna declares her love for books on every even numbered page in this, her own treasure of a book. Even in the final three sentences Anna writes: " Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home." For myself, Anna's personal declaration of love for books is a re-affirmation and reminder of my own. How those beloved blots upon the page can bring a sense of wonder, love and betrayal, sadness and joy, and all sorts of wonderous human emotions and experiences. Anna writes, "I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real than any other thing in my life." She also writes: "Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion, "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live."
Indeed, how can I ever forget those many days I spent in Edgar Rice Burrough's land of Barsoom? Or the great journey I took with Ursula K. LeGuin's wizard of Earthsea Ged, who follows his own shadow across an entire world facing ancient and powerful dragons? Or how could I ever beat the raw intensity, the feeding frenzy of Ann Rice's vampire Lestat, or the memorable demon lover Lasher, protector of the Mayfair witches? Or the electricity of Adrienne Rich's final line in her Ninth Symphony poem: "...music trying to tell something the man does not want out, would keep if he could gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy where everything is silence and the beating of a bloody fist upon a splintered table."
Carl Jung once wrote he was convinced the human psyche was the most tremendous fact of our existence. To me, books are the closest our physical reality comes to supplying the conscious mind with a physical counterpart to the unconscious mind found within us. Books reflect our inner unconscious; and offer us guidance, support, individual growth and collective knowledge. And although the human unconscious will act, whether summoned or not, or whether one reads or does not read books, self awareness, a greater capacity to love and understand, and the gift of living more intensely, are all to be gotten by the reading of books. If Ralph Waldo Emerson is right, and we ourselves are symbols, that inhabit symbols, then books may just be as valid a reality as the one we live in.
For myself, I agree with Mrs. Quindlen when she writes, "What saved my sanity were books." In some of the darkest moments of my own life, books have bridged me over to the next day, or even the next hour. Voices within the great books have spoken to my soul, whispering hope and life and love and welcoming me at any time, at any where. Let's face it, physical life, the disappointments, the failing to love when we could have or should have, aging, ill health, witnessing other souls like ourselves suffer in a world through seemingly no fault of their own, is a hard thing to come to terms with and harder yet to live life fully in spite of. And yet the mystery of it is - the mystery of those hieroglyphics upon the page - is how they reflect an inner world unseen and seemingly created out of nothing at all, and yet provide a power, a strength, to overcome life itself.
1263There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry -
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll -
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.