A Book is Not a Mirror but a Door

The landscape does not exist, but I can see it. A narrow concrete river channel, empty and dry with rough grey walls at 45°, snakes toward a disappearing point on the near horizon. On either side, riverbanks slope up towards a crooked line of mismatched fences, over which peek red rooftops and the green heads of backyard fruit trees. Where the channel disappears in the distance, there is a hint of city towers, though these I see less clearly. It is a suburban landscape but not unappealing in my mind. Something about the scene stirs in me a strange nostalgia—a desire to go there. The channel runs behind the houses through a neighbourhood. The grass is long, unkempt; it is an edgeland, and there is a sense of hidden places to explore and discarded things to find.

As I said, this landscape does not exist, and yet, I did not invent it. It is a memory from a book I read as a child, though which book or what characters walked there and where they were going or why, I’ve long forgotten. The image has lived with me for a long time, bright and clear. I have never been there, but I long to return.

C. S. Lewis once described his childhood in a way I recognise. “I am a product,” he wrote, “of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silence, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” I don’t mean to suggest that, like Lewis, I grew up mostly alone in a large Edwardian house with many rooms (though the idea is not unappealing). It is a particular atmosphere or feeling associated with childhood that I recognise in Lewis’s words. I, too, am a product of long, empty afternoons spent reading.

Some of the titles of the books I read as a child I’ve since forgotten. The stories live with me now only as half-remembered landscapes or as faint memories stirred up in me from time to time by certain sounds (laughter in a far room) or certain qualities of light (afternoon sun through high windows)—the vague ghosts of forgotten faces and names I once loved but no longer remember.

But some books I recall more clearly—where I was and what I felt when I read them. I remember when I was nine years old, my teacher, Mrs Brown, reading to the class Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. I never wanted it to end, though it made me so sad. I remember desiring with great desire the butter-pies in Diana Wynne Jones’s Tale of Time City. A butter-pie is a creamy, toffee-centred, cold dessert from the 42^nd century and remains for me one of literature’s great culinary inventions. I remember my growing wonder as the wooded ruin explored by the Pevensie children in Prince Caspian turned out to be the castle of Cair Paravel where they once reigned as kings and queens of Narnia. I remember the great empty copper corridors and rooms in Paul Biegel’s The King of the Copper Mountains and my worry that the Wonder Doctor would never find the Golden Speedwell to heal the old king’s failing heart. I remember my fierce jealously at my neighbour’s copy of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The text was green and red depending on which world the events were taking place in, and the first page of each chapter had a large, illustrated character, like the art in a holy book, marvellous and strange.

I once took a day off school, lying to my mother that I was sick, so I could read for eight hours straight the last book in Terry Brooks’s The Heritage of Shannara series. It had finally come available from the local library after long months of waiting. I sat in a chair in the garden, my knees wrapped in a blanket like an old man (maybe it was spring or autumn, or perhaps mum really was worried about my health). The sun traced a long arc on the turning pages. I finished the book just as I was called in for dinner.

Author Marilyn Robinson titled a book of her essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books. As an explanatory note for one’s life, this makes sense to me. Like Robinson, like Lewis, I feel myself a product of my childhood reading. Much was given to me in those solitary hours that I have been living out of one way or another all my life: the desires and yearnings that go deepest in me—where I find rest and joy.

When I was a child, I read books. And I’ve kept reading them.

A pile of books sits on my bedside table. I like to have five or six on the go at any one time, different genres and styles to fit different moods and moments. An old paperback edition of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra sits on top of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders peeks out from underneath Alan Jacobs’s The Narnian. A compact copy of Ted Hughes’s Season Songs marks a page in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Every evening, I read in bed before sleep. Often enough, I’ve also spent the few hours before bed reading, on the couch in the lounge under lamplight after the kids are down. A holiday is just an excuse to read more, only in a different location. Even on honeymoon, my wife (also a great reader) and I spent mornings browsing second-hand bookstores and afternoons sitting in an old pub reading our new books and—occasionally (but not too often)—talking about them.

There are books I love so much that I have purchased them twice, just to have the feeling of buying them all over again.

I love to be surrounded by books. The personal library of Italian novelist and academic polymath Umberto Eco fills me with jealousy. It was said to hold over 30,000 volumes. On YouTube there is footage of Eco, wool-vested and balding, walking through his house to retrieve a book. He ambles down long corridors lined with white, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, through great rooms with book shelves on every wall and more criss-crossing the centre of the room, dissecting it like septa in a nautilus shell. For over a minute, Eco walks without pausing before reaching the book. It is a labyrinthine library, like the library in Eco’s own novel, The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a fourteenth century Benedictine monastery. The monastic librarian in that book is named Jorge of Burgos, presumably a nod to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian novelist and one-time librarian who famously wrote a short story (“The Library of Babel”) about an infinite library the size of the whole universe. My personal library goals are more modest: I desire one wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a narrow wooden ladder to reach the top shelf.

At times, I have worried that my love of reading might be a problem. It can strike me as a hunger. There are moments I find myself scoffing down a good novel without really tasting it. My eyes flick back and forth, back and forth, across the page, the way old-timey characters consumed corn. What need in me is met by such reading? There is, I suppose, some element of escape. The busy, restless noise of my life—all my fears, hurts, and annoyances—begin to dim as I absorb myself in other worlds and others’ words. If we picture a book as a doorway, here I close it behind me. I read to shut the world out. But doorways open both ways. It is the experience of my life that reading has not primarily been a means of escape but an entryway into more and deeper life; reading has given me gifts.

Some gifts are simple satisfactions. The intellectual pleasure of contemplating significant ideas or issues, or solving complex puzzles (a murder in a Benedictine monastery), or encountering something impressive or masterful, something almost incomprehensible to us in its achievement. I feel this way reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, or Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, or the pocket-sized mastery of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Reading offers bodily satisfactions as well. Sometimes when I read, I enter an inner stillness that is pleasing. The world around me and within me quiets. My breathing slows. I feel myself both at rest and somehow more attune to the world, as if the nerves of my body normally sleeved in the insulation of my skin have somehow grown free, extending my sensory sympathies, connecting me to the external world. I feel a settled and pleasant alertness.

Some of reading’s pleasures are emotional. Good writing does not just describe the inner lives of its characters, it can invoke in us the same reactions—joy, happiness, sadness, wonder, fear. By nature, I am phlegmatic—the peaks and valleys of my emotional landscape rise and fall gently. Reading can awaken in me a rich emotional or affective life, can deepen or broaden the topography of my inner landscape.

There is more.

A strand of literary criticism, often prevalent in “Christian” readings of books, focuses only on the book’s message. Books are judged by how worthy or truthful the message is (there is a modern, secular equivalent to this impulse embodied in the much-debated existence of “sensitivity readers”). But such readings forget that books are made things. Out of the material of words a sentence is made, and words are sounds, and some words placed alongside other words create pleasant rhythms and textures and hues. The enjoyment of beauty is one of reading’s chief goods.

There are certain passages of literature I return to often for the beauty of the writing. I take the books off the shelf and thumb to where the page edges are rounded by regular use. The final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carroway stands on Gatsby’s “blue lawn” watching the “moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.” Carroway reflects on his friend’s dream and his failure to grasp it: “He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Or the closing pages of Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, with its keen, solemn sense of elegiac longing— “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them”—and its perfect last sentence: “I am haunted by waters.” Or James’s Joyce’s The Dead, with its description of snow falling on Ireland, “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Sometimes it is what is brought into the mind’s eye as we read that is beautiful. In the company of nature writers like Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard, I trek through wild and beautiful landscapes, going in my imagination where I dare not go in my timid body. With J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven and other what I call writers of “landscape fantasy,” I venture even further afield, into places of strange and wondrous beauty.

Sometimes, it is moral beauty that we encounter and are moved by in our reading. I once leant a copy of David James Duncan’s novel, The Brothers K, to a friend. She returned it a few weeks later with a note: “Sorry for the last few pages.” I turned to the end of the book where tear stains puddled the paper. I smiled. The Brothers K ends with one of the great scenes of family and community love in action to which tears are a fitting response.

Enjoyment of beauty is one of the gifts of literature and, yet, we can be hesitant about beauty as Christians. We can be conscious, perhaps, of living in a certain story of the world and therefore wary of competing stories. A good book, we think, is a book that emerges from or proclaims or conforms to the story we believe. The beauty of the writing is, at best, a nice to have, and, at worst, a deliberate attempt to distract from the truth (lies “breathed through silver,” as a pre-conversion C. S. Lewis once called myths). But we forget that one of the first things we learn of God is that he is a creator who delights in what he makes beautiful. We forget that the old way to think about beauty is that it is from God for God is “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver” (Hopkins). Even authors who use beauty for ugly ends cannot wholly wrest beauty from its true home, its native country. Beauty calls us to God, stirs in us what Pope John Paul II called “our hidden nostalgia for God.” Beautiful writing is a gift, and reading can nourish us.

I suppose I am offering here an apology for reading literature. My motivation is partly personal—how might I account for the hours and evenings of my life? But not only personal. To risk a foolishness, I am tempted to say that how we think about reading is how we think about our whole lives before God. When I ask, What is the good of reading?, I am pulling on a thread that is connected to a whole fabric of other, more obviously theological questions: how has God made this world, who are we human creatures, what does God expect of us?

Already, we have at least one answer. God made this world beautiful, and its beauty is to be enjoyed. Literature that is beautiful may be a means of enjoying God’s good creation and, through creation, God himself. But I want to go further.

Consider the case of the list slippers. List slippers are slippers soled with fabric, and the author Gustave Flaubert saw fit to mention such slippers in the following passage from his novel, Madam Bovary. He describes the protagonist, Emma, playing piano:

She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

The list slippers is just one concrete detail in this minor miracle of a passage, named alongside the clerk’s bare head, his sheet of paper, the high road, the open window, the buzzing strings. I can see it. I can hear it. Through the careful accumulation of concrete and sensory details, Flaubert has created a miniature world and, as I read, I enter in.

In her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor uses this very sentence to illustrate how good writing is always concrete and specific. “The world of the fiction writer,” she observes, “is full of matter,” full of “the texture of existence.” In another essay, O’Connor quotes with approval the judgment of Henry James that writers who are not concerned with concrete details are guilty of “weak specification”; our eyes glide over their sentences. O’Connor herself is never guilty of this particular literary sin.

It seems to me that one of the generative assumptions energising the art of literature, or perhaps any art, is that ordinary life matters and rewards attention. To attend to particulars, to choose carefully your words and to render these particulars visible to the reader is to act on a belief that there is worth or dignity in human life, in human history and psychology, and in the ordinary landscape of our days, even what we wear on our feet.

O’Connor again:

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

This strikes me as a theological point, unsurprising from a writer who described herself as a “hillbilly Thomist.” It would be a strange and misshapen Christianity that considered itself too grand to get dusty. Christ himself had no such qualms, and, from the beginning, God has insisted on the goodness of our being made of dust.

Reading that helps us stare long and hard at the world and see it more clearly is a genuine gift.

Often, I feel as if I am sleepwalking through my life. Much that happens to me passes unmarked, unnoticed, like images on a TV screen playing in the background, or voices on a radio in a neighbour’s yard. I am inattentive. And I fear I miss much that is meaningful and life-giving.

Good writing takes the clutter of our lives, gives it order and shape and existence outside of ourselves, and thereby enables us to step back and consider it. Reading gives our experiences back to us to be seen and weighed and newly understood. What Robert Frost said of poetry seems to me true of good prose: it offers a “clarification of life, … a momentary stay against confusion.” I read, then, to chart my own inner landscape. What is hidden or obscure in me is brought to light, given a name and discernible shape. “Yes! That’s it,” I think, “though I could not see it before.” Reading can awaken me to my own life.

But my gaze does not, ultimately, settle on myself. A book is not a mirror but a door.

There is a species of optical illusion in which you stare at a bright image for a minute or so and then shift your vision to a blank wall and see projected on it the same colourful image you’d been staring at. A good book is a bright, clear image. Stare at it long enough and then shift your eyes to the world and you see an afterglow. But, unlike an optical illusion, you don’t see what’s not there; instead, reading can help you see the colour, complexity, and texture of the world more clearly—life is illuminated.

Near the end of his life, C. S. Lewis reflected on a lifetime spent in the good company of books, begun when he was a child in solitude in “empty sunlit rooms” among the endless shelves of his father’s library. He asked, Why do we read? And, he concluded: “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves” (An Experiment in Criticism).

Each of us is naturally provincial. We see the world from one point of view. Our experiences, history, and psychology limit what we know and understand of our lives and the lives of others. Among the potent spells of good writing is the ability to transport us into the body and mind of other people, even, in certain genres, other species and beings and objects. To read a book is to inhabit for the duration of reading, or for as long as the words and images live in one’s head, the perspective of another. We see through other eyes. We are enlarged.

It is not just the perspective of the characters we enter; it is that of the author. A novel emerges from a thousand little choices—this word not that, this detail not that—all of which add up to a story that carries something of the flavour of how the author sees the world, what they care about and feel and notice. Novelist Zadie Smith puts it this way: “writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.”

As babies, we learn by watching what our parents pay attention to. Something similar happens in reading. We begin to see the world as the author sees it, for good or for ill. “You spend the morning reading Chekhov,” Zadie Smith observes, “and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non-sequitur, a dog dances in the street.”

There is gift here. To read great writing is to feel your own internal language clarify, sharpen, become more beautiful, wiser, more generous. It is to have the scope of one’s empathy enlarged. Reading, therefore, has a moral dimension. It can be an enactment of the hospitality, community, and self-giving that as human creatures is ours by nature and vocation to live. Reading can prepare us for the good work given us to do. To love our neighbour, we must first learn to see our neighbour, notice the chatty waitress and the dancing dog, or—with the Samaritan—notice the person crumpled on the side of the street. We must learn to see the world through their eyes, answer the question, “Who (really) is my neighbour?” And, as Jesus (and Chekov) showed, the best way to do so is with a story. A book is not a mirror but a doorway.