Day 9

All that is gold does not glitter, 

Not all those who wander are lost; 

The old that is strong does not wither, 

Deep roots are not reached by the frost. 

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, 

A light from the shadows shall spring; 

Renewed shall be blade that was broken, 

The crownless again shall be king. 

J. R. R. Tolkien

If we tell ourselves into being then so, apparently, do we read ourselves into being. At least according to Francis Spufford. I remember when I first saw the title The child that books built – I had to read it! Childhood and books are synonymous for me: I cannot think of one without the other. If I had a reason to get up each morning and to call the world beautiful, it was because of the stories I read. The worlds I encountered between pages were always far more real and important for me than anything I might encounter in my daily universe. In fact, knowing that everyone had the power to read and to discover these worlds, and knowing that someone had believed them into existence in the first place, I could not understand how the everyday world could be so – prosaic. Okay, I didn’t use that word back then. But it fits. When we have so much that we can do, why do we choose not to?

Francis Spufford, I believed, must have seen what I saw; that the world was far richer than most would allow it to be. And, if books had created me, I wanted to gain insight into how, and what that process was about.

Instead, I learned that the title was a misnomer. A deliberate one? I couldn’t find the evidence of intended irony in the text, but perhaps I missed it. And it is too long ago now – I cannot remember the details. I would like to reread it, but then, with all the wealth of story that is mine for the having, do I have time to go back?

Because Francis Spufford, from what I could read, was not, after all, a creation of his books. The books came into existence through him. Or rather, they took on life through him. At first I was frustrated, disappointed; then I began to wonder. What if, as Barthes would say, the author truly is dead? And words exist, not as living entities, filled with inherent meaning, but simply as potentiality, with a host of possible meanings, possible worlds, that could not come into existence except through their connection to a reader? For a start, that wouldn’t fit well with my pantheistic ideals, unless I consider that perhaps the words are indeed alive entirely on their own, but that they also create new universes with every connection they make to a reader. Think about what Anaïs Nin said:

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Imagine every thought, every idea, every possibility in the sum total of existence. And imagine that each one may come to light only when the causes and conditions are right. Only if the right entities meet (the right people, animals, geographic locations, circumstances, ideas – the list is endless), can a new thought be conceived and born. And that idea will manifest differently, depending on its antecedents and the nature of the union itself. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about Ideas as separate beings living in the Cosmos; being non-corporeal, they require union with a person in order to manifest their potential. They are alive for her and have conscious intent, but it is only through connection that they achieve fulfilment. It is like a fertility rite, the union between Human and Idea (or for that matter, between any corporeal entity and Idea).

And so, Spufford was not created by books; instead he found himself in them. The process of his own evolution was not one of building but of recognition. Because he found himself becoming ever more selective in his voracious reading, drawn to certain books, styles and thoughts, but not to others. And within the books he felt compelled to read, he was attracted to particular characters, particular aspects of the book. As he discovered, his friends were not always attracted by the same characters, or, if they were, not always for the same reason.

Thus, each person who picks up the same book will read an entirely different story and emerge a different person. Each may be changed, but not in the same way. If this is true, then the ambitions of every religious zealot or censor are forever frustrated and doomed to failure from the outset. We will each of us find only what we are ready and able to find at that time. This feels true for me. After all, Madeleine L’Engle was a Christian, but as I grew up with her books, she taught me, not about Christianity but, presumably unintentionally, about Paganism. I didn’t know it at the time, except that she conceptualised for me a belief that I would later call pantheism. And, combined with all the other factors in my life – all the other stories, both human and otherwise – I discovered who I already was.

I am filled with books. Even though the number I have read is far smaller than that of many people of my age, due to the slowness of my reading, even so I seem to spill over with them. And some of them tell me that I am far from alone in feeling lost. Have you ever felt overwhelming guilt for your own grief at being cut off from your very self? Guilt because you have everything and apparently want more? Guilt because you cannot want what you are supposed to want and be satisfied with what you already have? I know it like a twin; she has walked with me everywhere I have gone. It is as though we were born conjoined and our independent existences were limited by our physical need to travel always together, with the choice of one applying equally to the other. And now, it feels, we are newly separated, but uncomfortably self-conscious, completely uncertain about how to move, speak and act for ourselves. We have no experience of it, and each step feels strange, oddly light and unbalanced.

How many books did I devour about children growing up in war zones? And Guilt fed eagerly from every one. These children rarely talked about their resentment towards their sister (unless they were Anne Frank) or their despair about their schoolwork. Their problems were huge, their lives dominated by a reality far greater than any individual desires or dreams. And I felt guilty. But also a little sorry for them. If there was one thing I mourned more than any other for them, it was the loss of their ability to carve a precious, unique, individual life for themselves. They seemed entirely defined by their trauma, by their time and place in history. They had lost the right to be defined by their personal desires, quirks and simple, every day preferences. Chocolate or vanilla? Ridiculous as it sounds, I think everyone should have the right to make that simple choice one of the most important and defining ones of their existence. I personally think that chocolate and vanilla are huge; they are part of the stuff that makes our lives into a miracle. And I want the world to allow it to be an important, defining feature of every life. Why should we be defined by something we do not choose for ourselves?

Just occasionally, as a child, I read a book that showed me that I was not alone in wanting to find – and answer – my own questions about life. The very existence of such books was like a guilty surprise to me, and I had the weirdest feeling that I should hide the fact that I was reading them, as if I were reading something “bad” – like – I don’t know – pornography or something. There was one book I read in high school that was kind of weird – quite short, but appearing to have “literary” pretensions. Perhaps because it was a little on the “prickly” side and did not seek to introduce itself easily to me, I have only the haziest memory of it now. I certainly cannot remember either author or title, nor enough information to easily google it. I remember though, it was about a girl, living in a family in which the expectation was that when she grew up, she would marry. Until such time as they married, she and her sister remained a financial burden on their poverty-stricken family. Through their marriage, they had the power to reduce the number of mouths to feed and thus alleviate the workload and burden on their parents. There were no other paths open to them; marriage was the only option according to their custom.

Only the protagonist had a role model for an alternate reality. Her grandmother had been a suffragette – she had been to university and had travelled the country, giving talks and changing the consciousness of the times. The girl had never met her, but she had inherited the rich scraps of material her grandmother had apparently intended to sew into a quilt but never managed to find time for. It seems a bitter irony, in retrospect, that in all that she achieved, the grandmother was unable to alter the fate of her own grandchild, caught in the very trap she was fighting to unlock.

The girl was introduced to a wealthy prospect whom it was intended that, as the eldest in her family, she would marry. It transpired that the mother knew her eldest daughter would never cope with the life of hard and ceaseless manual labour in which she herself had grown up, so she sought a wealthy husband for her child. Being completely unable to offer her education or independence (and not even really believing that such things existed, her own mother being something of an aberration), she did everything she could to ensure a life of ease for her eldest. It was the only gift she knew how to give.

But the girl was horrified and looked forward to the prospect of marriage as to a death sentence. She stopped eating, becoming progressively weaker and more dependent, unable to fully contribute to the work of the family. She felt horrendous guilt at adding to her family’s burdens when she should be relieving them, but she could not force herself to move on with the business of living.

Instead she sewed. In her weakened state, it was the one thing she could still do. She took up all her grandmother’s scraps and decided to finish the project first conceived by her heroine. As she sewed, she imagined that each scrap represented a dress her grandmother had worn in far-flung places, at important events. Dresses her grandmother had worn as she learned, travelled, advocated and taught. The scraps were a legacy of hope and possibility. She sewed every scrap of hope together and quilted each piece to its padding and binding with beautiful patterns and designs. Then the younger sister, for whom marriage held no sting, became affianced to her own intended future husband. The protagonist was encouraged to consider her quilt as a wedding gift for the younger sister, the one useful contribution she could make. With this bitter thought, the quilted designs changed, becoming crawling insects and other beasts. The nature and mood of the whole work changed, much to the distress of the covetous younger sister. Until finally, at the very end, when the legacy was entirely realised as a completed quilt, the girl made a discovery. She found a scrap of paper, identifying all the scraps of material as belonging to a kit. Her grandmother had never owned the dresses from which these scraps came. There was no personal significance. The scraps were merely part of a commercially-sold kit that her grandmother had presumably bought on a fancy and then never found time for. Her grandmother was too busy living her life to deal with something as ordinarily domestic as sewing.

How does the girl’s story end? Does it end? I still remember the final words vividly, and the question mark contained within them. I won’t repeat them here, even though I have already ruined the story for you. Why is it that these words have remained so firmly with me, when so much else has been lost, including the author and title? Why do I feel a need to relive them? Because they tell me that I am not alone in wanting my “self” to matter. Whereas Frodo, Samwise, Merry and Pippin sacrificed their happy, comfortable lives to something far greater than themselves, I do not wish to. Whereas many aspire to be Luke Skywalker or Superman or even Batman, I would instead be Rat or Mole, living forever comfortably in my cosy home by the river, boating in the summer and sitting by the fire with fine food and drink in winter, never seeming to have to work for the comfort of my existence. The girl in the story lost to memory wanted to create her own epic tale and made choices accordingly, even at the expense of the comfort of her family. And for that she is my guilty heroine. I recognised my own dreams for an alternate personal reality in her. But, given the choice, I would not even create an epic tale; I would join with Rat, Mole and Badger in Wind in the willows, relishing every beautiful day and avoiding Toad as far as possible. Or else I would have the life described as ideal by C. S. Lewis: writing in the morning, walking in the afternoons, and spending the evenings with books and conversation by a welcoming fire.

Where do the beguiling wor(l)ds lead me, and what is my choice?

i do not exist 

a life lived only in dreams 

stolen moments seen through another’s eyes 

knowing itself to have no claim on the world upon which it gazes 

the life unborn 

impossible of nurture 

is at least forever free 

untainted and unfettered by the necessity of compromise 

or the details of reality 

knowing no duty of care to another

dancing in silence 

as insubstantial and as perfect 

as the myst in starlight