Autobiographical reflections on relationships with books, writing, and language

¶ … Narrative

My Personal Relationship with Literature

I can still vividly remember the first time I was completely bowled over by a work of literature. I was fourteen years old and sitting alone in my living room at one o'clock in the morning. It was, of course, entirely dark outside, and the only light in the room was the small table lamp next to the armchair in which I was sitting, curled up until moments ago but now bolt upright staring blankly at the empty black beyond my faint reflection in the window pane that overlooked our quiet street. There was nothing outside that caused my sudden shift in posture -- no sudden car alarm or the brief but vicious outburst of yowling from the cat fight that seemed to be a nightly occurrence, no shift of shadows or abrupt arc of headlights exposing me in my repose. Likewise, there had been no unexpected noise or movement from within the house. I was entirely alone in the silence and soft light, a just-finished novel in my lap.

That paperback had been the cause of my realigned position, and more importantly it realigned my perspective on life and my respect for literature in ways I am still only beginning to understand. I have read the book several times since, and though it has never failed to impress me I have never recaptured the same feeling, largely because I always knew and expected what was coming at the end of the book. But although I could never again get the same feeling from the book as I did that first time, when I completed it in the dead of night simply because I couldn't bring myself to put it down and go to sleep, my reaction and the realization that a piece of fiction written forty years prior could cause it has stayed with me. Ever since ten, I have become completely fascinated with the ability of stories -- the right words in the right places -- to move people, and to shake the very foundations of their worldview.

The book was John Steinbeck's the Winter of our Discontent, the author's last novel and for some reason one of his least well-known. Ever since my experience with that book I have been completely enamored with most of the great American author's works, and dismayed at the way some of them (most notably and regularly the Grapes of Wrath) are rendered oppressive and dull by the way they are taught in school. The pure passion of the stories and the depth of human understanding that Steinbeck obviously possessed in spades are what makes his novels and short stories great, not their historical value or his use of literary tropes. But at the time I was reading the Winter of Our Discontent, my views on the subject were not nearly so sophisticated or articulate. I had simply read a book that I absolutely loved, and remained sitting virtually motionless for twenty minutes after reading the final paragraph, digesting what at the time seemed like an over-full meal but which proved to be merely an appetizer to what would become the ongoing literary smorgasbord I have enjoyed since.

My love of reading was not knew; as my mother tells it, I absolutely demanded to be taught my letters before I reached kindergarten because I was desperate to decipher the symbols I saw all around me. I had already read the Hobbit and moved on to the Lord of the Rings trilogy before I was ten, and it wasn't uncommon for me to be in the middle of three books at once. Even then (and this has to remain our secret, dear reader), when I felt the need for a light break, a literary "snack" if you will, I would secretly borrow one of my little sister's Babysitter's Club books and read it from cover to cover in an hour. I did not particularly care for the characters, but again I was enraptured by the stories and the way they could so simply be made compelling.

Then came the Winter of Our Discontent, which made glorious my own relationship with literature. After reading this, I rabidly went through pretty much everything Steinbeck wrote, starting with his shorter novels (the Pearl, of Mice and Men) and moving into his collections of short stories (Tortilla Flats) and his novels about the Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday). A year later, I branched out drastically into the world of science fiction, reading Asimov and Phillip K. Dick as though they had the secrets of the universe woven in between their lines of prose, and if I could only red enough of them then all would be made clear. I guess I still think this is true to some degree; every story has elements that every human being can relate to, and each time I begin a new story I am hoping to pick out those elements and add them to the mosaic of my own understanding of human beings and the way(s) we are.

Something happened, though, when I got to college. Not only did reading take a back seat to many of the other elements of college life, but I found that it was simply impossible to actually keep up with the amount of reading expected in each of my classes. I could have read everything I needed to for anyone or even two classes, but not for a full course load. At this point, reading stopped becoming an endeavor as necessary as breathing and started to fell like a chore. I stopped reading for fun, and only read what I absolutely had to in order to pass a test or join in classroom discussions. My love for stories had taken a back seat to the point that it became completely ignored, dusty and forgotten. To be fair, the story of my own life became a lot more interesting than it had been in high school, and I felt the weight of authorship quite heavily as the choices I made became real, but I had forgotten that reading could be an escape from all of this.

Every time I would see the Winter of Our Discontent on my shelf (I still have the same Penguin Classic paperback I was reading that night years ago; it is dog eared and the spine is cracked, but there aren't any pages missing...yet), a small pang of regret and even guilt would hit me, as though I knew that I had given up on something that used to be a major part of my life. I would stare at the book, and the white clapboard house that adorned the cover would stare back at me from its New England whaling village windows sullenly, the neglect it felt obvious even to my now-calloused eyes. Eventually I turned the book over, so the windows couldn't watch me as I went about all of my other business now so much more important than reading.