Have you ever read something simply as a means to carry you through pain?
Have you ever sought out a book, short story or essay to equalize the tumult that was going on inside you?
Have you ever come across a paragraph or a piece of dialogue that made you suck in your breath in a moment of sharp recognition. . .the air growing still because you understood, perhaps for the very first time, that you were not alone in your loneliness, anguish or despair?
So it is with words that wrap a blanket around our shoulders, giving us comfort as few things can.
I believe that stories can be healing. They have been from the very beginning.
Oh, I don’t mean to be simplistic and say reading a few pages of Scarlett riding up to Tara can alleviate years of abusive pain or deep agony from death, divorce or the hollowness that life can sometimes bring.
And yet…
I think about my own life and the waves that have sometimes crashed in. Next to the visceral knowledge of a caring Creator, the deep embrace and warm words of a cherished friend, I often pick up a book to lift me out of myself and into story. It does two things. It lifts me out of my myopic vision and at the same time helps me identify pathways or origins of pain sometimes hidden, letting clarity and relief come in.
I think of Pat Conroy’s novels, scarcely fictionalized epitaphs of his own life, that are jarring, horrifying, even. But they also bring a cleansing because the truth is laid out so lyrically, so inescapably. It must be dealt with. And we, the reader, journey along with his characters to deal with the onslaught and like them, find reconciliation and a brighter sun to lift our face up into.
There’s the other end of the spectrum where there are barely a couple hundred words to a story while still giving a momentous impact. I’m thinking of Shel Silverstein’s classic fable of love and forgiveness, The Giving Tree, and I often tear up at the so simple yet profound truth found in its few, scant pages.
It hard to ride the trail with Gus and Call and not be swept into both their mundane and epic lives. Their friendship and their perspective on life draws us in and in the end, though there’s regret and loss, there’s also a strange kind of comfort and coming to grips with all that is happened to them.
On the non-fictional front following the boys who-will-soon-be-men in Stephen Ambrose’s incredibly absorbing ‘Band of Brothers,’ from training in Georgia all the way to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest is a haunting journey. Yet it’s also one of incredible accomplishment, and once again loss. But as we’re brought into the DNA of these young lives, we see how they deal with the horror, exhilaration, pain, and escape…much in the way we would. They’re ordinary lives – and extraordinary – all at once. Just like us.
Journeys such as these, through the conduit of fiber and ink, bring experience, knowledge and I believe, ultimately comfort; a comfort as real as a cherished friend embracing us in our need.
