Only connect
One of the things that is becoming clear to me as I write these posts is that even though I think of reading as a solitary activity, I also think of reading as a way to connect with others, and that this possibility of connection is part of why reading (and books and literature and poetry) matters to me.
Though, of course, even as I framed that opening, I thought of ways in which reading is not solitary at all. Parents, caretakers, teachers, older siblings often read to children. I remember being read to in elementary school – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, A Wrinkle in Time, Bridge to Terebithia – and how that was always a favorite part of the school day for me. When I was older, and teaching a course on literary criticism, I had assigned some of Tolkien’s scholarly essays, and then learned that most of my students had never read his fiction. So I read them The Hobbit, and even though they were all adults it didn’t feel silly or strange to do this, but rather became a lovely thing that helped bond the class together.
We make book clubs, where even though the reading is done separately, people come together to discuss the book and their reactions to it. We pass beloved books along, whether as physical objects or as recommendations. We write essays on what words and books and reading mean to us, and we send them out, hoping there is someone else out there for whom these thoughts resonate, hoping for a connection.
But the thing that I have been thinking about – and let me be clear that I am far from any kind of conclusion – is why. Why is reading a way that I look for connection, when I do consider it to be solitary, when one of the things that I love about it is that it is a solitary activity?
I think some of it is the impulse to share what I love: This thing makes me happy, let me share it with you and maybe it will also make you happy. It’s an impulse that increases when the person I am sharing it with is also someone who makes me happy. Not something done together, as such, but still something done in common.
I also think it is because words and stories matter to me, and that they always have, and so by looking for connection through reading, through words and stories, I am also looking for people for whom this is also true. I see stories as a way to communicate, to make sense of things, to say what is important, and so sharing them is a kind of reaching out, a kind of drawing closer.
Which still doesn’t quite get at the solitary aspect, only the connective one, but maybe that’s the one that’s more important to address. That we share stories for the same reasons we tell them, and that one of those reasons is so we can find ourselves a little less alone.
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