"I see it there: the hunger. Someday you will need to run as much as you need to breathe."
I am a runner. I have not always been a runner and the story of how I became a runner is a story for another time and place. Running has become such a part of who I am that I can scarcely imagine that it was once not integral to how I defined myself or that it has not always been so. I have actually come to believe that we are all runners, in fact. You may laugh, I realize this. But, we are. Our bodies were made for it. We are quite literally designed to efficiently endure the exertion of running for longer and further than any other animal moving across this earth. It is one of the keys to our survival. The shape of our feet, the placement of our bones, the specific ways our muscles and tendons stretch across and bind us together, even the way our skulls sit atop our spines, these are all adaptations that allow us the ability to run upright for long distances.
I do need to run as much as I need to breathe. Running has become so central to who I am that I do not think of my running as a hobby or an interest or some sort of extracurricular activity. It is woven tightly into the everydayness of my existence, very much like something as involuntary and necessary as breathing. I hear people say often that they get most of their thinking done when they run. But for me, when I am in the middle of a run, when I have loosened up and found my rhythm, my mind drifts off and meanders without me. I become conscious mostly of elemental things, the air entering and exiting my body, the thumping of my heart, and the ground ricocheting up into my limbs. It is very nearly like dreaming. Oh, do not misunderstand me, there is pain. But, one of the many things I have learned from running is that our bodies and we ourselves are capable of far more than we allow ourselves to believe. Just as pain is a part of life as much as the joy, so too is it with running. To find the place where both pain and joy meet in that thin sliver of delicate balance is to find the thing that gets you through to the end.
The quote above comes from my latest read, Running the Rift, by Naomi Benaron. I have read only one other novel about running, the classic from John L. Parker, Jr., Once a Runner, which I highly recommend whether you are a runner or not (see my list of Shipwreck Books). Both are coming of age stories, but Benaron's book is set in Rwanda in the years surrounding the 1994 genocide there. Yes, I have found yet another book about enormous human tragedy on an immeasurable scale. It is a tragedy of which I was aware, but it had never before been personalized for me, nor had I ever taken the time to investigate the full context of that event, not that it is entirely possible to understand. I must say I came to this book with high expectations and felt at first a bit let down. For lack of a better way to put it, the writing seemed a bit ho-hum for a while. As the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994 happened suddenly and in the course of a relatively short amount of time, though, so too does Benaron's book quickly wake you from the doldrums as the chaos and fear of those days begin to upend everything. It is brutal to read, of course, and it will knock the breath from you. Benaron tells the story through Jean Patrick, a young man and a gifted runner with Olympic aspirations. He must not only face the uncertainty of growing into adulthood and the questions that itself brings, but he must do so in the face of so much loss and so much suffering. Running is all he has to keep his mind about him.
It did not escape my attention that last Tuesday was National Teacher Day, but I confess that it did occur to me later that here I am writing a blog in homage to literacy and to my reading life and I had not acknowledged the most important influences on me as someone who loves to read.
Thank you, Mrs. Davis. My third grade teacher will forever remain in my heart the most important teacher of my life. There were many other great and influential ones after her, but it was she who first recognized my curiosity and made a point of cultivating it. What I remember most were her questions. It was not enough for her to know I had finished a book. She wanted to know about it. She wanted to know what I had thought, what had impressed me, what had been left unanswered. And, oh, how she loved to talk history with me. In third grade in Virginia in those days there was great focus in social studies on the history of our home state, actually known to me because of Mrs. Davis as our Commonwealth. It is only a slight semantic distinction, this I know, but it is one of the many things that she pointed out to me as setting Virginia apart and for which I should be proud. And, she read to us. It was because of her that I came to know what the Newberry Medal was and that I still love Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It was she who made it okay to cry over the ending to Where the Red Fern Grows. It was because of Mrs. Davis that I read these books together with my own child (and may have cried a little at that ending again) and when I did I thought about Mrs. Davis and wondered if she had any idea that her influence now stretched to the next generation, if she ever considered that not only had she left a mark on my life, but she had done the same for a child she has never even met.
Thank you, Mrs. King. I remember fearing the day I would have to begin tenth grade English. Mrs. King's reputation preceded her as particularly intimidating and she lived up to it. But, I came to relish her class, her snarky attitude, her sarcastic humor, her piercing stare, all of it. I relished it and I loved her as a teacher because she did not placate us. She was honest, brutally so, and direct in both her criticism and her praise. And, there was plenty of both. If you crossed her or fell short of her expectations, she let you know. But, likewise, if you put forward your best and gave back an amount equal to what she herself brought to the table, she also let you know. What I remember most is reading Julius Caesar in Mrs. King's class. As well known as she was for her toughness, she was equally renowned for teaching this bit of the canon to hundreds of graduates of my small town high school. People remembered Mrs. King and they remembered Julius Caesar. Because of her we understood the context, the humor, the puns, the full meaning of a difficult work that we likely otherwise would have simply suffered through.
Thank you, Mrs. Beamer. I had the good fortune of having Mrs. Beamer twice, for ninth grade English and for a dual enrollment college English course my senior year. Others who had her and she herself may very well be surprised that I consider her a great influence on my reading life. Many of us who were her students owe her a thousand apologies in addition to our gratitude. We took advantage of her sometimes inability to control the discussion in a classroom and of the fact that she could often just be a difficult person to understand. But, I will forever be indebted to Mrs. Beamer for having me read James Still's River of Earth. It was this book that taught me first that stories from the mountains are just as important as stories from anywhere else. Because of her I first began to understand what Appalachian literature is and that its distinctive voice is an integral piece of the larger American story. Mrs. Beamer could stun me with her seemingly random pronouncements in a creaky voice that would suddenly become loud and clear, stopping dead the chaos and din that was her class. And, God bless that woman. She never laughed or even cracked a smirk when I told her, with utter seriousness, that I intended to become the next Ernest Hemingway.
I wonder now if I would have grown to love reading as much without these people in my life, but it really does not matter. Because I do love reading and it is in large measure because of their influence. If I had any natural inclination to begin with, it was these teachers and others who steered and prodded me along and opened my eyes. I single these three out for their influence on me related to the world of books and reading, but of course there were others who I will never forget for their roles in my life. Teaching is the noblest profession. I am lucky to be married to one of the great teachers, in fact. And, I am lucky to have known the teachers above and all the others.
Thank you, Mrs. Hayes. Thank you, Mrs. Patton. Thank you, Ms. Reynolds. Thank you, Ms. Winesett. Thank you, Mrs. Combs. Thank you, Mrs. Shaw. Thank you, Mrs. Parsons. Thank you, Mrs. Nuckolls. Thank you, Mr. Patterson. Thank you, Mrs. Blythe. Thank you, Mr. Phibbs. Thank you, Mrs. Combs. Thank you, Ms. Miller. Thank you, Ms. Woodruff. Thank you, Ms. Morton. Thank you, Mr. Brooms. Thank you, Mrs. Smith. Thank you, Ms. Key. Thank you, Ms. Carroll. Thank you, Mrs. Gatchell. Thank you, Mrs. Bray. Thank you, Coach Spangler. Thank you, Coach Garrett. Thank you, Coach Hale. Thank you, Dr. Luker. Thank you, Dr. Reiff. Thank you, Dr. Kellogg. Thank you, Dr. Lang. Thank you, Dr. Keller. Thank you, Dr. Reasor. Thank you, Dee Dee. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Tal.
The PEN/Faulkner Award was officially presented this past Sunday to Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic. The list of PFA winners is yet another source of first-rate fiction if you are looking and is a list from which I often pull. In fact, I read Otsuka's novel earlier this year simply because it had been chosen as a finalist. Reading The Buddha in the Attic prompted me to then read her previous work, When the Emperor Was Divine. Both books are nothing short of phenomenal, but I do confess that Emperor stood out for me a little more. I had not thought to write of the Otsuka books here until I had the privilege this morning of hearing her interviewed on The Bob Edwards Show and was reminded of the excellence of her work and of the thoughts I had on my mind after reading it.
One of the more intriguing things about Buddha is Otsuka's use of the plural point of view. Her employment of the pronoun "we" is a brilliant approach to the construction of her narrative and allows the novel to tell a collective story. It is a story gleaned from individual stories but told in a way that says this belongs to all of us. An individual narrator with a name is never identified, but the reader still has every sense of just how personal the story actually is. This bit of craftsmanship is quite striking and I was amazed at how such a small and subtle difference in word usage can do something as powerful as make an account so personal by the very virtue of its anonymity. In the interview with Edwards, Otsuka spoke about the technique as indicative of a marker of Japanese culture as well in the way it is more focused on the group than on the individual. It was also fascinating for me to hear her talk about the difficulty she had with the writing process when starting from the "I" point of view, saying that it was only when she tried the "we" that the work came together and began to take meaningful shape.
Both books from Otsuka address the lives of Japanese immigrants to America in the years before World War Two with The Buddha in the Attic told through the eyes of so-called "picture brides" who were sent to America to wed the Japanese men already here. This was a practice that was simply a long distance version of the arranged marriages that were customary in Japan, but Otsuka claimed also in her interview with Bob Edwards that if a white woman had chosen to marry a Japanese immigrant, she would have been stripped of her American citizenship, so the men were also left with little other choice when it came to seeking spouses. Dealt with in both books but more central in When the Emperor Was Divine are the effects of the internment of over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into "relocation camps" during the war. It is important to point out that well over half of the people sent away during this time to the camps were full citizens of the United States. This is one of those dark and little remembered chapters in our country's history, though it should be easy to understand the context of such an event given the state of the world in our own time and especially given the pervasiveness of fear and of the treatment of Muslim Americans in the years after September 11th. Still, it is difficult to imagine such a thing occurring today and it seems unbelievable that it has been nearly forgotten. Entire families simply disappeared. A classmate at the next desk over may have literally been there one day and gone the next. Houses and personal property were abandoned to whatever may come in the absence of the owners or sold at a tremendous financial and personal loss to them. Jobs and businesses and livelihoods were to be left behind with no inkling at all of when or how they might be reclaimed. It all just seems amazingly unimaginable to me, the fact that in the relatively recent past we could have corralled up and placed behind fences one hundred thousand of our own citizens simply out of mistrust. And Otsuka writes of those people and their stories magnificently.
Which brings me to the book I finished last, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. I find myself wanting for words as I am troubled by this novel and think it will be one that may need to stew a bit. Johnson also tells a story of mistrusted citizens, and it is in particular the story of one citizen who may also be thought of as anonymous, for over the course of the book he takes on different identities. This book is another bit of craftsmanship as the writer has assembled it in such a way as to make us wonder exactly which version of the story is the truth. The narrative itself becomes an illustration of the confusion and paranoia in which the people of North Korea must daily try to eke out their lives. The best they may hope to do in order to survive is to simply endure while they are forced to accept whatever truth is put before them. There are some brutal scenes and moments of utter and horrific suffering here. Those scenes and most of the first half of the book are written in a bit of a flat, matter-of-fact tone, but it is language through which a reader can feel the drudgery of what life there must be like. As the novel progresses through its second half and the main character develops over the course of years though, Johnson's writing becomes more and more fluid and he offers here and there some especially moving passages. This one is particularly good and speaks to questions raised by both Johnson and Otsuka in their books.
"Sun Moon came to him. In her hands was a hand-painted chang-gi board. The look on her face said, How can I abandon this? He'd told her that they could take nothing with them, that any keepsake might signal their plan.
'My father,' she said, 'It's all I have of him.'
He shook his head. How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live -- you could see it go out of him -- when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you love safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away."
