Books and Memories

I think books are an amazing thing. Every time you read a book, it’s fresh and new, like it’s coming alive for the first time. I’m reading a book now that was originally written something like fifty years ago. The writer died seven years ago and wrote things after this book, but this is the book I’m reading now. A Separate Peace. I remember the book well and I loved it when I read it eight years ago (wow!) as a freshman in high school. It’s an American classic and the writer’s crowning achievement. It just seems amazing to me that a book written so long ago, sitting somewhere on a shelf in a library, can just come alive as though it’s being written as I read it. I love that feeling. It’s the same with Shakespeare or any great piece of literature. It can be as old as papyrus, but when you’re reading it, the characters are living, breathing human beings (or animals, depending on the story) who are living this adventure as you read it. Every time you put the book down, you imagine that the characters stop, waiting for you to pick the book back up so they can go on with their lives. Yet, when you’re reading it, you get the impression that they’re not waiting for you, that they have more life than you are reading in the book. They have a past and a future, and, unless the book is written essentially in real-time, which is rare, they have many moments and minutes and hours and sometimes days or years in between passages in the book. In great literature, we get the impression that the characters extend beyond the scope of the story. Teenagers were born, waddled their way around the kitchen table, became toddlers, went to kindergarten, played with the blocks, tried sports a few times, learned to read, went to middle school and felt the cruelty and immaturity of other kids but also the joy of having essentially no responsibilities, went to high school and began to really find themselves, began preparing for their future, will go to college and plan for a career, continue to find themselves, learn what it’s like to live with people who aren’t your family but can become like family, graduate college and emerge into the real world in a career. Will have families of their own. Any part of that may or may not be in the story you read, but we can imagine the life of any character as extending beyond the scope of the narrative. Maybe they don’t go to school—maybe they’re too poor or a delinquent or whatever—but we can still imagine what they were like before page 1 and what they are like after the last page. It’s really an amazing thing. These characters aren’t real, so why should we care about them so much? Because the writers have made them real, have made them feel and look and talk and think real, the way we do, so they are relatable. We forget so easily that they are fictional when we root for, love and revile them. We get so emotional when reading stories, because it truly feels as though these people whose adventures we are following are real people. Literature provides an escape from our own lives, but it can also hold up a mirror and remind us of things in ourselves and teach us about things in ourselves that we may not understand. The book I’m reading now is one I’ve read before and I know what happens, but the fact that I haven’t reached the fateful turning point of the novel makes it seem almost possible that it will be different. Maybe Gene won’t take the action that forever changes his life and Finny’s. I know it will happen, because I’ve read it, but it’s been so long and the narrative seems so fresh and new and happening right now that it almost seems possible that it will turn out differently this time. Literature endures, beyond the life of its author, forever. As long as people continue to read it, it never dies. It’s always there, at your fingertips, waiting to be grasped. Waiting to be devoured, interpreted, understood, debated, enjoyed, felt. It may be something that’s been read a million times before by others, but it’s still new to you who are reading it for the first time. This book in particular is so powerful because it is about the loss of innocence. It begins with two teenage boys at a private school in New Hampshire. I’ve never gone to private school, but I still can identify with these boys, because every school has these character types. An introverted intellectual and a daring, confident athlete. A shy, rule-abiding fellow and a charismatic rebel who shows him the joys of rebelling against the system and turns him into a rebel himself. No matter where you went to school, you had these two types of people. I know I did at my school. This book reminds me of my own upbringing in a northern American town, when I was in high school, learning about myself and others, playing soccer on dew-drenched fields, the sun glinting through a summer haze. Working hard and making fun of each other and laughing about stupid stuff and just having the time of our lives, not worried about growing up and getting jobs and surviving. Just being in the moment and enjoying our innocence. There’s something so powerful in that. And the whole idea of going back to a place you’ve been long ago and noticing the changes. Noticing how the buildings look smaller, the staircases look shorter, the ceilings look lower and the teachers look older and maybe smaller, too, now that you’ve grown. There’s a little more rust on the soccer goals, a little more wear and tear on the grass, which has more brown patches now. The pavement in the parking lot has a few more cracks and maybe there’s some grass and weeds sprouting up from between them. It’s always kind of a surreal experience revisiting a place of your youth. We always tend to imagine things staying the same, that when we go back to the school of our youth it will be just as we left it, not having aged a day, even though we know this isn’t possible. When we go back, we realize that nothing is immune to change. Everything ages, wears, crumbles, and eventually falls. It may take hundreds of years, but it will eventually fall. The narrator of the story explains how he saw the Devon school as coming into existence the first day he set foot in it and burning out like a candle the day he left. Especially when we’re young, we think of things as existing only in relation to us and ceasing to be when they are no longer a part of our lives. We have this notion that somehow we’ve created these things by seeing them and being a part of them, that they only really exist in our minds, and certainly, some people will claim they do. I don’t think that’s true, though, because you read about things happening in your absence, and when you go back, things have changed. Maybe it’s just the changes in you, though. I think maybe I’m getting a little too deep for my own good here. My point is that there’s something powerful about going back to one’s roots and saying, “This is where it happened. This is where my foot stepped a thousand times—no, more than that—on my way up the stairs to class. This is where I sat and ate lunch with my friends, where we made stupid jokes and laughed for hours about them. This is the field where I played soccer with my friends. This is the ground where I sweated, where I fell and got back up, this is the dirt that mixed with my skin and my sweat when I was working my tail off in the hot sun. This is the trail where I kissed my girlfriend for the first time, my first kiss, and all the awkwardness that went along with it. Where I made the decision to take that step, where I decided, enough is enough, I’m going to do this, and where I was changed forever because of it. That person I was five years ago is still inside me, still there, though I’ve grown and changed. That person I was is still as real as the stairs he walked on which are still here in their original form.
That kid my parents loved with all their heart from the moment he was born is still inside me. The kid my mom baked cookies for—peanut butter and snickerdoodles, two of his favorites—on his first day of school each year, up through high school, is still inside me. I can still taste them--they were delicious and just the thing I needed to take the first-day jitters away. The kid my family supported all through high school and college, coming to soccer games, seeing him in plays, driving him endless hours to and from school, is still inside me. That scared little kid whose father had a heart attack, scared but at the same time too young to fully understand the import of what was happening--he's still inside me, too. Looking back and realizing how close I came to losing him at the age of seven, I thank God for looking out for him and continuing to look out for us all. That little kid who looked up to the father he almost lost and said, "I want to be like him when I grow up." He's still there inside me.
Someone once said the true chapters of life don't begin until age thirty. Everything before then is preface. I don't know if I agree with that, but I do believe I have many exciting, educational and soul-defining years to come.