I realize, of course, that things can get overly serious around here at ToFGT from time to time. Ok. Most of the time. In spite of that knowledge, I was proud of my last post, in which I was as direct as I ever have been about an issue of great social and political weight. It was difficult to do such a thing, but it was a relief, in the end, to express publicly those particular thoughts.
With that behind us, though, I was reminded this week of the pure fun, the sheer pleasure in hearing or reading a good story. Storytelling speaks to something particular about our humanity, something primal and definitive. To think of how much we have and continue to communicate to one another about our deepest and most elemental feelings, about the questions we ask ourselves in the quiet and alone moments just by telling one another tales. To think how much pleasure can be found in hearing a story told. And to think of how long we have been doing it.
I finished last week one of the classics, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which I had been prompted to read after mentioning it in my post about Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds. About halfway through it the thought crossed my mind of the timelessness of the great, old books, the ones whose titles we have all heard, whose words we will even sometimes pretend to have read in order to flash our literary credentials. These are the stories that so fully capture the human condition that we at some point came to an unspoken agreement that they would be the books that lasted. One can read them and it is as if all the history of us, all that has happened since the tale was first told has not happened at all, even though, at the same time, it has ever been going on and on. When reading them we enter a moment in time that is unmoving, but that nevertheless reflects all of what we are always. We are able to simply pick right up where things were and drop ourselves into that moment that may not be our age, but that is still a time and a place we fully recognize.
This is why I like to read. To be transported, to look up on a snowy Saturday and to have devoured half a novel, to have been in that other country. I have become a big fan of The Brilliant Blog by Annie Murphy Paul and she hit on some of this in a recent post of her own. In it, she referenced an article about a study that looked at the effect good fiction can have on our ability to feel and express empathy. It is an amazing thing, reading. Like running, it is something so simple, so basic, requiring so little in the way of expertise or equipment, yet it can literally reshape our lives.
Thus, I found myself this week behind the wheel of my car cheering and talking quite out loud to no one but myself as I listened to the audio version of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. The climactic scene in the novel takes place at a baseball game, and I realized at the height of the tension that my hands were white-knuckled with their grip on the steering wheel. The characters and what they were experiencing at that very moment had become so real to me, that I was there, too. I was feeling it as they were. And I had to laugh at myself. After all, I was in my car. Driving to work. And these people at whom I was yelling were not actually real. In the midst of something as ordinary as it gets, I had somehow slipped off into another world, another life.
A good book draws you in, makes you ask questions of yourself that can be difficult. It can make you experience pain and sorrow and also moments of elation. It can make you beg and weep and laugh out loud. You can experience the full weight of an entire lifetime in one book. And, in the end, it is a great and simple pleasure.
