The Solace of Reading in a Topsy-Turvy World

This week has been an Alice in Wonderland kind of week. I awoke to find myself down a topsy-turvy rabbit hole that I was not expecting, and I have been reeling ever since. I immediately turned to the ballast of books to steady me as wave upon wave of emotion, grief, and realisation threatened to capsize me. The first book I reached for was a perennial favourite of mine, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a story that captured my heart as a child. But I tossed it aside as soon as I got to the end of the first page, when young Mary Lennox is described “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.” It was too much to bear; it reminded me of Timothy Snyder’s wonderful On Tyranny, which I had just re-read last week. I am done with the word “tyranny” for a while.

Deciding that escapism would be my preserver, I turned to some illustrated Christmas children’s books, notably Clarice Bean: Think Like an Elf. The innocence of the young protagonist and her faith in a world that is undoubtedly good, was restorative. The humor and delightful illustrations buoyed me for a while, but then my eyes yearned for rest, and I longed for a soft voice to talk me to sleep. And who better to do that than Meryl Streep, of all people, who performs Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake on audiobook? What a distraction that was. The light and observant prose carried me along, restoring my belief in a world of kindness, honesty, and joy found in physical, simple things.  There is wisdom on almost every page - spoken by characters who care for one another, in a quintessentially optimistic book, although it is set during the pandemic. (It deserves a separate review, which I will get to soon.)

It encouraged me to lift my head above the parapet and peek out into the big, bad world again, so I picked up Anne Applebaum’s latest publication, Autocracy, Inc.  Where the other books transported me away from the world of corruption and politics, this one took a can opener to my brain and filled its tunnels and ridges with a scalding reality: we are tiny cogs in a power play between the great economies and ideologies of the world. You ask yourself - is it better to know all of these things, or just to look away. I decided on the former, but as there is so much to take in from this book, so much to digest, that I felt I would need to read it in instalments, so I put it aside for another day.

Then I stumbled across Maria Popova’s blog, The Marginalian, and a post on E.B. White’s letter to a man who had lost his faith in humanity. Check it out here. Yet again, the wisdom of words spun me 180 degrees, and deposited me in a new place, with a new mindset. It is sometimes easy to forget what the world has been through in the past, to imagine that things are as bad as they can get.  Yet, somehow White’s words were a reminder - there is always hope. Every dark cloud hides the sun, yet the sun remains still - it is only cast over by a temporary air mass, and even in winter it shines. 

Why is it that the words of writers, written down on the page, can bring such solace? Is there magic in the tangible object of a book, the solidness of a font stretched wide across the page, the sound of words spoken in performance, the shape of a letter addressed to a stranger? What is it that makes us reach for words and stories in a time of crisis? Perhaps it is the structure of the thing itself—an author putting word after word, sentence after sentence, page after page into order—that is so appealing, like a scaffolding to cling to. The most popular author read in the trenches of Flanders in WWI was Jane Austen; we owe her resurgence in the 20th century to the men who feared they might die at any minute in a barrage of fire. But why was that? Did they long for the security of Austen’s world or her prose, where, in the hands of Austen’s beautiful sentences, they could feel safe? There is nothing fractious, explosive, or shocking in Austen’s prosaic style, unlike Dickinson or Plath, say.

It is in times of great stress and anxiety that words, books, poems, blogs, letters, novels, and audiobooks can save us. Through escape or by taking us deep inside the thing that we fear most, books are the answer. If I had indeed fallen down the rabbit hole in Wonderland, and I was searching for a sign to help me escape, I would pass by those that said ‘Drink Me’, or ‘Eat Me’, and would choose the one that said ‘Read Me’, for that is surely the way to get through what we need to get through.  Do yourself a favour today: read something.