How Books Teach Me to Love Myself and Others

Empathy is one of reading's most important side effects. No matter the genre, a book will take you someplace you have never been, let you see through someone else's eyes, and teach you the complexity of the human mind and heart.

I was not raised by abusive parent figures who played favorites with their children (Harry Potter); I've never had to wonder who or where my father was (Percy Jackson); I didn't have to deal with anything like deafness wading through the already-murky waters of high school (Five Flavors of Dumb); I've never had to look beyond my own community for opportunity and an education (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian); but because I've read books where someone else experienced those things--because I came to care about characters who went through those things--I can appreciate, at least in my own small way, what that must be like. I don't want to say I'm an especially good person or anything, but I try to use that learning in my real life associations, and it has changed the way I see and treat the people around me.

I think if we want peace in this world, we need to promote literacy. I doubt anyone would be so quick to judge and slow to help if we just knew each other's stories.

Image credit: Webgrrl Firdaus

But every so often I come across a book that illustrates my own experience so well I wish I'd written it myself. I find clarity and validation in such books; they show me that I'm not the only one who thinks, feels, or lives the way I do. And sometimes that's a real comfort.

This week, for example, I discovered The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. You can read it here for free; it should only take a couple hours to get through, and H.P. Lovecraft himself called it the finest supernatural tale in English literature. Basically, two guys canoeing down the Danube River encounter an invisible, supernatural force while they camp on a small island populated with menacing willow bushes. If that sounds dumb, blame me; I wish I were even half the writer Blackwood was. He managed to take a tame subject and, without actually showing a monster at all, made it terrifying.

That's why I loved this story so much. Normally I'm not a big fan of horror, but the way Blackwood made a campout in the wilderness so unsettling actually validated something I've felt my entire life but haven't known how to express without sounding silly. I've taken a feeble stab at it in an essay I hope to publish soon:

I always hear a noise when I’m alone in the Uintas: the convergence of a droning chant, a whispered laugh, the howl of a coyote, a spiritual vibration in the gap between two astral planes. The wild song floats to my perception from a place just out of reach. It sings from the horizon, from the thicket, from the bottom of a lake, and it is always with me though I’ve never met it at its source.

I've never talked about this much, because to me it sounds a little crazy. Has anybody else heard the noises in the wilderness that I have? Is it real or in my head? Who would understand?

If a tree makes a sound in the wilderness but doesn't fall, does anybody hear it?

 
Algernon Blackwood understands. While reading The Willows, when Blackwood described a constant humming sound, black shapes moving in the dark, unnaturally shifting bushes, I cried within myself, Yes! I know exactly what that's like! At last I'm not the only one!

From Blackwood's writing:

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; [. . .] You think [. . .] it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own." 

I can't even say how wonderful this was for me--such a little thing, and yet, such a big part of my inside story finally validated with words more adequate than my own. I'm not afraid to talk about it anymore, because for once, I know at least one other person has experienced it, too.

All because I read a book.

If we want peace in this world, we need to promote literacy--not just so we can understand each other, but so we can understand ourselves, too.