Else another light go out
I remember reading with a constant sense of panic. It was a hard way to read, knowing that my mother would be sneaking up on me at any moment. Way past my bedtime, I read with one hand on the lamp, with ears tuned to the sounds of the distant television or adult talk, and eyes absorbing the letters on the page. I read fast, and I refused to let anything interfere with a book. I read on the school bus, despite the jostling and the other kids and the green stench of the vinyl seats. I read during math class, during dinner, whenever I found a moment where I could sit still. I read in car trips, so long as I sat in the back seat. I read in a panic because I refused to let a book rest. Books held sway, all other things, including my state of mind, came second.
At some point, I stopped. Television was forbidden, and hence more exciting. Hours spent watching cartoons morphed into hours spent watching Saturday Night Live reruns. The television morphed into the computer, and whatever free time I had was certainly not spent poring over books. Besides, I had all my patience for reading sucked up by Wuthering Heights, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles and other difficult school books. Not awful books, but not light ones and certainly not ones that made me feel the pull of novels. I finished Tess, feeling "Good God, I never want to read again."
It took light novels to bring me back to reading. It took books that left me with beautiful and good impressions of human nature. It took books that had a very obvious good impression of human nature: The Color Purple thwapped me over the head with its wonderful message about people. It took the lengthening of my attention span, it took the finishing of The Winter of Our Discontent. It took an English teacher with similar tastes, who could recommend books I liked. It took time, several years in fact. It took the advent of free time.
I had to finish The Winter of Our Discontent. I swore, some time early in my adolescence, that I was going to read my way through Steinbeck. Of mice and men? No sweat, finished it in an hour. The Pearl? Read it in school. I stared down the row of Steinbeck in the living room. Grapes of Wrath was too long, plus it was depressing. I didn't know if East of Eden was supposed to be depressing or not, but it sure looked damn longer.
I picked up The Winter of Our Discontent because I liked the title. I picked it up and read fifty pages, and prompty fell asleep. I slept on the porch couch, and woke disoriented and bewildered, wondering why the cloth and the pages of the books had taken on the mossy, damp feel of late summer nights.
I forgot about the book. I grew wrapped up in myself, in school, in other things like going out to movies and goofing off with my friends. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, working as a babysitter, driving aimlessly consumed my summer. Endless chemistry labs, cross country races (with none of the down time of crew races), and English papers consumed my winter. When I had a bored moment, a quiet time, I would pull out Winter and read a few more pages. I would usually do this if I needed to fall asleep.
I read that novel for two and a half years. I grew angry that it was such a sedative, but I also grew to liking the main character intensely. I grew from having a crush on him, to longing to know him in person, to sympathizing and empathizing deeply with him. And as soon as I had untangled a few more words, I would pass out. I insisted that I liked the book, but it made me tired. I grew bored with it, and moved onto more lively pursuits.
I read very little until I finished it. I snapped up The Bell Jar, which was probably a horrible thing to read at the time, and then I scarfed through Ursula LeGuin's essays on writing fiction. Aside from that, however, I read very little unless I had to for school. Even during school, I would find other things to do than read my assigned novels.
I finished it on an afternoon in May. I sat in the upstairs of the library, in a seat by the window that looked out on the shady and sleepy city street below. I tore through the last fifty pages, worried and anxious, feeling parts of me shift inside as the plot twisted and came together. Where I had felt confusion at the beginning of the novel, I found a wholeness and a message at the end. I read "Else another light go out," and as silently as possible, I heaved a sigh. I sighed because I loved the book, I sighed because the book gave me a twisted sort of faith in the world. I sighed because it wasn't easy to see the good in people after the book, but I could anyway.
I sighed because finishing the book meant that I could read other things now. It's funny thinking that I like reading now, that I finished two books yesterday. Part of me likes finishing a book quickly, because part of me just wants to read everything, and the quicker I read the better. Part of me, though, loves the struggle that was reading The Winter of Our Discontent. I fell for the morality of the book, I loved that there were twists and passages that demanded me to infer meaning. I read books now, and sometimes resent being thwapped over the head with meaning. "I'm a detective," I think, and scowl at the pages. Like a good therapist, good books should make you figure it out on your own.
I probably wouldn't want another book like The Winter of Our Discontent, though. I'm happy with my Elizabeth Berg (she made me cry!), my Ursula LeGuin, my Shirley Jackson, my Alice Walker, my Lord of the Flies, all the other books and authors I zoom through. They aren't lousy books just because they don't make me struggle. And there was a certain aspect of Steinbeck that took me longer to digest, that took more out of me than I can generally give.
I owe it my love of reading. I tore the dust jacket and smudged the pages, I fell asleep reading it, I took awful care of it. I owe it quite a bit, though. I read and read because it gives me a reason to keep going, to keep my light from going out. To stay up late, to keep from going to bed early, to keep from turning out the light.
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It's been nearly ten days since I last updated, but it's odd because I've been writing nearly constantly. I have two journal entries, one which is now a moot point and I'm not going to post, and one which is about some sort of abstract picture I had. You can read the second if you care to, it's sort of melodramatic and over the top. It's also a little vague, not even intentionally, and I don't like it that much. So I didn't grace it with a presence in my journal, just shoved it online. Even though I have the time to write, and the boredom necessary to drive me to making journal entries, I fear the lack of quality writing is a major down side of this.
Email me about books, or something.
2000-06-26, Else another light go out
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