Okay, true confessions: While I have been a teacher of reading for over two decades, I was not a kid who liked to read. In fact, I spent more energy in elementary school cheating on reading assessments than I ever did on actually trying to read anything. Reading was just too tedious. And what was the point, I mean, it was more fun faking it than doing it!
And yet a review of my old report cards reveals teacher after teacher who praised my reading skills! You can imagine how my students delight in this irony! And how keen I am to catch the fakers!
So I am a definite Johnny-come-lately to the world of literature. And since entering it, I am no veloceraptor in my consumption of books. The books I read are few, and more often than not discarded before finished. Yet the ones that resonate with me.... those I savor! I devour them purposefully, and I enter into their worlds with a passion that borders on mania. The characters become my intimates, and I feel all of their emotions, their every action with a presence of one inextricably connected to them.
My first experience of this intimate participation happened while reading “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. There's a scene where the protagonist recognizes Anna in a carriage and in his unbridled joy he runs along side of her buggy. It's a really pedestrian moment in the entire scope of the novel, and yet I suddenly burst into tears! I felt myself running there, the muscles of my legs staining to keep up, my lungs heaving with exertion, my heart full of the presence of my “beloved”. I swear to you, I cried so hard that I choked! And I was utterly amazed by the power of those century old words to grip my heart and squeeze it so!
And then I understood. I understood the allure of the written word. How like some drug, it could actually alter someone's state of consciousness. How words can command our emotions, delivering us to new worlds and new understandings of the world we inhabit.
My favorite novel is James Baldwin's “Go Tell It on the Mountain”. The first time I read it, was right out of college, and I can't remember for the life of me, why I picked it up. I have read it probably half a dozen times since then.
It's the semi-autobiographical story of a young black man growing up in Harlem in the shadows of his mother, stepfather, and aunt. Written as a triptych, each third tells the story of how each of these adults came to be where they are in life. My favorite scene is when the stepfather, Gabriel, is returning home after a night with a young woman, and on a lonely mist shrouded lane, he encounters God. It's just an utterly insightful and amazing moment in the novel. I have read everything that James Baldwin has written, and none of it reaches the virtuosity of this first novel. Not even the gay themed “Giovanni's Room”. This is his tour de force, and an oft-ignored American classic.
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