Why Write? by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson [Edmundson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632863065
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

TO READ AS A WRITER

Are there any days that are better than the days of early reading? I mean the time, usually in youth, when you first fall in love with books. Every book is a fresh intoxication. Every author who matters to you (and there are so many!) initiates you into a vivid, unbroken dream. Reading delivers you from your all-too-fixed position in space and time and takes you to a world elsewhere. It’s a form of magic, isn’t it? No matter where you are, almost no matter what’s going on around you, you can leave and go to some other place that is richer, more complex, and stranger yet also somehow more your home.

Books can cast spells, especially for the young. Every writer who matters to you (so many, and more to come) is a generous Prospero. He fills the island with wonders. She conjures the aurora borealis in the sky. I remember the bliss I felt when I learned that Shakespeare had written more than the three or four great tragedies one studies in high school. There were dozens of plays left! And all of them were there waiting for me.

The experience of reading in youth is one of total immersion. You become one with the author. You are no longer your ragged everyday self, but instead exchange minds and hearts with Walt Whitman or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Emily Dickinson. Suddenly our consciousness is expanded as we become identical if only for a while with a spirit larger than our own. We may not always be quite up to comprehending the splendors we encounter, but even in that sense of inadequacy there can be a feeling of optimism: There is more to learn, space to grow. There’s more to being alive than I thought.

Reading early in life—or reading with the ardor of youth—is what we might even call a form of reincarnation. Suddenly, we are born again as another. We are reborn into a spirit larger and more intricate than the one we possessed.

We lose contact with our quotidian selves, and all our daily worries and desires swim back into the recesses. We are then other than we are—and we feel all the better for it. To read deeply when young is to see the world anew: to read, really read, while in the first phase of life is to be doubly young.

I remember the first time I picked up Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. What a revelation that book was for me. It was above all things a young man’s book. Wolfe has a genius for rendering two drives in particular: ambition and desire. He is simply superb at chronicling what it is like to be young and to want to roll the world into a ball and have it as one’s own to toss and catch as one might please. Desire: desire for sex and love and belonging; ambition: the urge to be the best, to do what hasn’t been done, to be known and seen—no one could give that to you the way Wolfe could when he depicted Eugene Gant.

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