Tuesday
I’ve been dipping into A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, given to me by my good friend Sue Schmidt and recommended by reader Glenda Funk. A range of writers, artists, scientists, philosophers and others were asked to write a letter to young people about the value of reading. Original illustrations accompany the letters, and the proceeds go to the New York public library system.
Among the many letters, one of my favorites is by activist Rebecca Solnit, who talks about how literature came to her rescue when she herself was a child. Here’s an excerpt, beginning with an allusion to Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book.” I especially like the description of literature as “a strange data-rich-out-of-date version of what it means to be human”:
Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.
The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books, learning from books a strange data-rich-out-of-date version of what it means to be human. Books gave me refuge. Or I built refuge out of them, out of these books that were both bricks and magical spells, protective spells I spun around myself. They can be doorways and ships and fortresses for anyone who loves them.
When I was in middle school, my own fortresses against loneliness and the ugliness of segregationists were Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books, Greek mythology, and the Arthurian tales. My bitter medicine was To Kill a Mockingbird. What works came to your rescue?