The Rise and Fall of a Literary Civilization

Lewis Carroll wrote, or maybe said, that when you don’t know where you’re going, any road can get you there. Maybe I’m paraphrasing. The thing about attributed quotes is they sometimes change in the telling and re-telling. Maybe Carroll said that any road can get you where you don’t know you want to go. Or maybe he said that all roads lead to Rome. Or maybe he said nothing of the sort, bent, as he was, on mapping Wonderland.

Books also get you where you don’t know you want to go. You can escape into a book, or you can let a book help you escape. You can wait for the next book in a series, reading, and re-reading what came before, looking for clues as to what will come next. Or you can fit inside the pages, tumbling through a wardrobe with the Pevensies (beware the Turkish Delight), or taking your turn with the Sorting Hat (nothing wrong with Ravenclaw), or helping Harriet spy on her neighbors (who hasn’t imagined what goes on inside someone else’s life?).

My earliest memories are of stories, not just the stories that were read to me, but the stories I first stumbled through, learning along the way that hear and here mean different things as does to and too. And these stories shaped – and still shape – me.  Inside stories, everything ends, and happily at that, and death isn’t real, and the hero gets the girl, or at least the treasure; and if the hero doesn’t, don’t worry, a sequel is sure to come. Inside stories victory may not be guaranteed but by the end – or, The End – victory seems the only way said road – story – can end.

Inside stories a writer’s imagination, if wielded right, can sweep you into uncharted territories. A generation of girls – women now, passing on the text as if it is sacred – learned about going all the way thanks to Judy Blume’s Forever. And the hidden dangers of living in an attic were made clear, at least according to V.C. Andrews (let’s pause to consider the continued series emerging from the Andrews school of writing, mostly about girls born into wrong circumstances who overcome adversity to find happiness and love).

I’m a purist. No e-reader for me. Something about the texture of the pages, or even of the words. Something about the way the scent of certain books remind me of different moments in my life. Nancy Drew is my third- and fourth-grade years. And Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony recalls driver’s ed during my sophomore year of high school. A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower reminds me of winter break during my freshman year of college. And Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat is mostly my junior year of college, recommended, as it was, by John Cech, a professor at the University of Florida. Books as time machines; show me an e-reader that can do that.

I’ve recently started thinking about books in terms of classic and new. Classic being old, of course, and new being undiscovered. I suppose I straddle the space in between classic and new. I’m old, at least in terms of the books I’ve consumed and still hold inside, but I’m also new, as in still undiscovered. I rarely leave a book unfinished (a recent exception, Fury by Koren Zailckas, because despite how her then-boyfriend treated her, she marries him, which we learn in the book’s dedication; when I realized I hated this man, and hated that Koren married him, I couldn’t finish the book, if only to keep from hating it), and I rarely go long without recommending a book to someone, pressing it into their hands and saying stop what you’re doing and read this now (my copy of a galley of Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus is making the rounds, because it is a book for which you should stop everything).

I decided when I was eight-years-old that I wanted to be a writer. Be a writer, as if writing is something you can be instead of something you do. Maybe I envied those who could masterfully manipulate words, or maybe I envied being read, as if being read means the same thing as being seen. Who doesn’t want to be seen? Or read? Remembered for something other than living and dying? Words are what remain when civilizations fall, and words are how we make order out of what has no order.

Books can take you where you want to go, even when you don’t know where you want to go. Books are friends when you think no one understands you. Books are journeys and destinations. Books are. And sometimes, just being is enough.