Sometimes you unexpectedly get a moment of clarity
when standing in line at the Dollar General, wasting time on your phone while
the lady three people ahead of you writes a check for a gallon of milk.
I came across an article on Twitter, "Closing the Book," by Dylan Landis. She starts off, "It didn’t surprise me, when my parents were dying, that I couldn’t write. But it shocked me, as a writer of fiction, that I couldn’t read." And that sums up what the rest of the article is about: losing the focus or ability to read after a parent's death--or in her case, the death of both parents.
"Holy shit," I muttered under my breath, as I started scrolling quickly, reading it as fast as I could. (Not that I needed to hurry. I am uncertain how fast I can read, but it turns out it's "faster than a check-out line moves on Saturday morning.")
This whole not-reading spell has been going on with me for nearly a year. Calling it not-reading isn't really fair. It's not that I'm not reading: I am reading. I'm not finishing. I still buy books and I sit down and start something and...then I stop. I don't mean for the night. I don't mean because it turns out it's not any good. I just slowly stop and don't come back.
Like Landis, I keep a list of books I've read each year. It's almost September. This time last year, I had read 36. This year I've only read 16. But six of those were for a class I took back in the spring, and in all honesty, I didn't completely read them. So that means only ten books I've read and finished by my own choice.
I've started so many. There's one right now that I love. I took it out of town with me and would stay up fighting sleep just to read a little more. Then I came back, and it's stayed on my nightstand, the bookmark in the same place every day.
Landis doesn't really know why she lost the comfort of reading. She thinks it has to do with a general loss of focus, or maybe that she "couldn't tolerate endings."
I thought about that. Was that my problem? Was it the fact that I'd start a story and it would end?
In some ways, this hypothesis could be supported by what I had been finishing, but not recording: A. Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" short stories. I didn't add these to my book list, because they are part of a larger work (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, specifically) which I would add once totally finished. But while each case ends, the overall story continues. I'm nowhere near the final thoughts of Dr. Watson, so these "endings" are not real.
But that doesn't sound right.
What I personally think is going on is that once Mom died, I lost the one person in my immediate circle who understood books and reading. She was the one who taught me to read, who taught me the pleasure of reading and being read to and reading to others. And we shared so many times reading together when I was little. We came full circle, even, as I read to her from The Beatrix Potter Treasury her last day in the hospital, towards the end of the last time she was really aware.
Whenever we'd talk, we would discuss what we were reading. She kept up with my reading throughout school. Not because she was a helicopter parent, but because she wanted to tell me if she'd read it and liked it (The Outsiders, for instance), or if she wanted to read it with me because it sounded good (Bridge to Terabithia). And she told me what she was reading. There were always books laying around our house. Always.
It's not that we shared the same interests. I delved into fantasy and sci-fi, and she would read some romance. But we still talked about what we were reading and listened to each other. In some ways, that was more effective: if I told her what Harry Potter was about, then she was aware of the significance without having to pretend she liked fantasy and read it herself. Similarly, I am familiar with the Alex Cross novels' general plot (and still want to sit down and read those someday).
I know the obvious solution is to join a book club or discussion group, but that's not what we did so it wouldn't fill the hole. It wasn't planned or prompted: these conversations were natural. Reading was so important to us that it became part of each day's talk. "What are you reading?" was up there with "how are you doing?"
Over 30 years of that. And now, it's all gone.
It's hard, then, to find the focus to sit down and read, because when it's over, that's it. I guess in a way it is dreading an ending, just not like what Landis described. It's an ending of the experience where you have lived another life for 300 pages, and you come back to reality, and there's no one to share it with.
And why even mention it? If anything, the past 5 years have shown me how everyone has some tragedy, some misery, that they deal with every single day. I'm not special: we are all broken. The best thing you can do is to try not to contribute to someone else's brokenness. The best thing you can do is to try to help them keep the pieces together a little better. And for your own sanity, there are stories: music and movies and TV shows and books and plays and beautiful, wonderful ways to escape and connect. Thankfully I've still got movies and TV, but those were always more "my thing" more than "our thing." And conversations about those stories come up more naturally and often. So there's that, and I am thankful.
I still miss reading, though.
Eventually, Landis said, she was able to read again. But it took time, and effort, and it's not the same. For me, maybe I've found my way back in. Yesterday I stumbled on a new graphic novel at the library. I hadn't read a graphic novel in a while, so I hit up the shelf and came out with 2 others. The same day, while in an empty movie theater, then sitting at Sonic, then lying in bed, I read half of one. Like TV and movies, graphic novels had always been "my thing" separate. They're not just novels; they are art. I still like them. Maybe they'll be the warm-up act, the thing that holds my hand and brings me back into the fold, even if I am alone this time.
