My mother told me, “Books are your friends.”
What was I doing? Standing on some, maybe. Or I had thrown one across the room? Maybe I’d written in one: our old family copy of Charlotte’s Web, which I somehow managed to take with me when I left my parents’ house, and which I read to our children three or maybe four times, is inscribed in crayon with large and clumsy efforts at spelling “Becky.” Maybe I wrote in lots of books, maybe I tore their covers, and maybe my mother thought I shouldn’t.
“Books are your friends.” I know I’d heard it more than once–likely many times. I vaguely remember reconciling myself to the statement sometime in high school, for the first time encountering, rational and aware, a mantra that had been ingrained and accepted, a patent fact since time out of mind: “Books are your friends.”
It was true, and I knew it. It had been true–steadfastly, steadily true all my life.
There was that panic at some point during middle school when our local library suddenly announced they would be having a book sale. I walked in fear for days. Which books would they be selling? And why? And could we go to the sale so that I could buy my favorite ones?
Afterward, to my very real relief, the entire series of The Borrowers remained intact, still shelved in Fiction N.
Yes, books are friends. Companions. Anne (of Green Gables) was my best friend in 8th grade. And Charlotte whispers to me from every spider I gently whisk into a tissue to deposit outside.
Others accompany me in other ways. Daisy’s dock-end green light and the “fresh, green breast of the new world” are with me every time I return to Long Island and so often when I think of capitalism run amok. The Movie-Goer makes sense for me of life and also the imponderable mystery of New Orleans; The End of the Affair tells more truth about God than I can neatly summarize.
I pace lawns and terraces with To the Lighthouse‘s Mr. Ramsay; I knit socks and brood over tree-top rooks with Mrs. Ramsay. With Ms. Woolf’s Lily I gaze at a table pitched upside down in the branches of a tree; with her Mrs. Dalloway I hear the clocks’ chimes as “leaden circles dissolving on the air.” These characters and scenes are more presently with me than what I served last night for dinner. Recalling them comforts me and also quickens thought.
Reading makes me reach for the dictionary, for a pen. The best and favorite of my books are endlessly dog-eared, their passages underlined or bracketed in the margin, their end-pages re-invented as lists of vocabulary words.
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark–readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
-Possession, by A.S. Byatt, p. 521. Random House, 1990. Last week I finished reading it for the third time. I read it on my own first in 1993, a second time with a book club ten years later, and now, thirteen years after that. And I find I am not finished with it. My reading this time, again on my own, sent me–as the best books do–to The New York Times book review, just to see what the reviewer made of it back in 1990. But that wasn’t enough. On Saturday evening, I found myself reading The Paris Review No 159, Fall 1991, and also lists of other books by Byatt. I was wanting to find analysis of the poems she wrote for this novel; I was wanting to find discussion on her many uses of the word “possession.” I was looking up “liminality,” I was considering new meaning for the color green. I was making for myself a list of Things To Read Next: Byatt’s The Djinn of the Nightingale’s Eye; Eliot’s Middlemarch (again, gladly); Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot.
The book had set my mind spinning, and I was wanting conversation. Someone to talk about it with; someone to send my thoughts running with after these and new ideas. If a book is a friend, then it is the best of companions. And if it is a companion then certainly it has things to talk about. Ms Byatt, in 1990, started a conversation. And on Saturday night in my dining room on my laptop, I tried desperately to join it.
Liminality: noun. Being in an intermediate state, phase, or condition.
And now I, too, have started a conversation. It’s not quite as long as Ms. Byatt’s. At 310, mine is the shorter by 245 pages. But this book of mine is an invitation to conversation.
We are in a liminal phase, this book and I. There are current readers out there, but I don’t know them. They are librarians, book bloggers, book reviewers. People in the publishing industry who rightfully get a head-start. And I’ve heard back from a very few. A very very few. The book and I are waiting now for the book’s full release. We are very much in-between.
I won’t say I’m not enjoying this phase. I will say it’s difficult. I think liminality is, by nature, a difficult and complex condition.
But it’s fine. Time passes.
And soon enough, there will be readers. Readers who have asked some of the questions the book is asking, perhaps. Readers who may possibly have answers. Readers who will discover things I meant to tuck into the book’s pages, and maybe some things I didn’t.
What I hope is that this book become conversations, and that we will have new friends because of it.