Books as kindness
“I could send you some books if you want.”
A friend made this offer the other day. Without going into too much detail, August has been a little bumpy here (I feel like this is true for many of us, too many people right now really just getting bruised by the universe) and my friend noticed. They’re also in publishing, and so they could send books. I said yes, of course, but that’s not really the point. The point is the offer was made.
Part of the theme of this newsletter is, and has always been, that books are more than just ways to transmit stories, and that stories are larger than their contents as well. That part is important, absolutely. I’m a writer – I’m not about to deny that. But even for things that are already bigger on the inside, there is a weight of meaning in them.
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I was hospitalized for a few days my freshman year in high school. It was an unplanned admittance, so I hadn’t brought anything with me, and I was desperate for something to read. When my dad came to be with me, he brought a stack of his books – all Tom Clancy novels. He was pretty sure I had read all of my books, and he wanted to make sure I had something new, and enough books that I wouldn’t be bored. This was not an author or genre I read, or would have ever picked up under normal circumstances, and yet I was delighted to see them, and read them all, and I still have a lingering fondness, because of the kindness of the gesture.
Another friend sent me a book on kindle recently. We’d been talking about it, they loved it and suspected I would, I said I’d add it to my list. But you know, I was busy, and stressed, and and and. When I woke up the next morning, it was in my inbox. And I did, in fact, love it.
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Maybe what I’m actually talking about here is just kindness, full stop. Maybe I’d feel the same warmth and gratitude over a cup of coffee together, a pair of warm socks slipped into an envelope and into the mail. The thing that signals “I’m thinking of you, and I’d like to make things just a little softer for you.” Maybe I’m reading into the fact that these were book-related kindnesses because I am a reader and writer and have seen those things as part of who I am for so long.
I do really love warm socks.
But I also think that the fact that it was books matters. A story gives you another world to slip into, for those 300 or so pages. It’s the kindness and comfort of a distraction. If you’re like me, and you have a brain that just really likes to worry about things, something that will distract your brain from worrying is a really great gift.
I’m making, I suppose, an observation and an expression of gratitude here, more than any kind of point. Or if there is a point that it goes along with my continued theme of books as a means of connection, and isn’t really any deeper than that. So I don’t have a neat, writerly button to tag on the end of this post, and the ones I could use sound like platitudes, but I’ll use them anyway: kindness matters. Be gentle with yourselves. Take care of each other.