It is with some degree of a confessioners shame that I admit that I am “one of those people” who has always wanted to do one thing. J It is my personality to love only a few things and love them deeply, and I cannot remember a time when my love for words and stories, was not the deepest love of all. (Oh crap, do I sound like a Whitney Houston song?)
I have never spent much time distinguishing between which type of story to love. Was it Mark Twain who said journalism is lies about real people and fiction is the truth about fake people? I will read it all, and my head spins now with names and titles, authors and phrases I have never forgotten… Even the words in cookbooks. All of the possibilities in those recipes! (I would have invited Socrates to my picnic, but something tells me he wouldn’t want to come!)
The first moment I can remember on my journey to “communication” happened when I was 12… I have never made excuses for my painful shyness and general awkwardness but it may have had something to do with why I thought I was hot shit laying in my bed with the covers over my head, wearing a gigantic headlamp that made me look like a coal miner from South Africa, reading a book I could not put down. (Yes, I really did think that if I hid under my bed with my gigantic headlamp that my parents wouldn’t be able to tell that I was still awake.) I was reading Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and I was crying, my hands trembling. I could not believe the words I was reading. They belonged to me in a way nothing had belonged to me before. This book, these worn sheets of paper and ink, was my mirror, my life raft, my escape. The words meant everything to my 12-year-old self. I read them again and again.
Words like these: "She was made up of all of these good and these bad things...She was the books she read in the library...Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrells she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk...She was all of these things and of something more...It was something that had been born into her and her only."
And words like these: "Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere-be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."
I was 12, but reading that book was the first time I felt exhilarated by words. I wanted to write like that. I wanted to make people feel the way I felt. I wanted to “communicate” with words, to tell stories that made people feel alive. That made them burn the way I was burning then... And if I couldn’t do that, then maybe I could just make them feel a little less lonely. Even for a few pages.
It is funny and a little bittersweet to think how little has changed in 20 years… :0)
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2 comments:
Funny how several of the texts referenced by you all have touched me deeply as well (although the ways we make use of those experiences or what we attribute to them may differ). I too read "A tree grows. . ." at approximately the same age (along with Nietsche for reasons I won't go into here). It really opened up a way to acknowledge the depth and complexity of those gaps between us while simulatneously (for me, anyway) providing a bridge to aspects of my own experience I'll spare you from here.
Thanks for your story, Emily.
Leda
Emily, that's just beautiful! I had a similar experience with an italian book that was translated in Bulgarian simply as "Heart" (in English it it "The Heart of Boyhood). I kept asking people if they had read it... Years later, one person answered "yes" - Remi, go figure & we would always remember the book together & re-tell it to each other. Last Christmas I bought him the first English edition (1929 w/ a cute inscription inside). We were only able to read the first 20 or so pages - perhaps because of the translation, or because of our growing cynicism, the charm was gone from the pages. But it is still in us. I know people say we should re-read books to find how we've changed... but i think sometimes words only make sense when they are "trapped" in the beauty of a first encounter.
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