I thought I would get philosophical (for a change!) and ask what it means to love a book. I often hear the phrase: “I liked it but I didn’t love it”, applied to a book. It surprises me to hear the word love so selectively applied to a book when it is so easily bandied about otherwise: “I love these potato chips.” It seems that we have more reverence for the word “love” when we refer to a book. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my own inner desire to save the preciousness of the word by using it only when I believe it to be true love. It seems to me that love for a book entails both the rapture of first love and the commitment of forever love. If that is the case, no wonder I find it hard to love just any book. By “rapture of first love” I mean that recognition of the book’s beauty, its goodness, its literary qualities all of which are experienced in a kind of rapture, a losing of myself in the world of the book. (Sounds very much like falling in love for a person, doesn’t it?). By “Commitment of forever love” I mean that I choose, that I select and prefer this book to the many other books I have read. It means that the book is now a part of me and I a part of it. It means that I don’t want to leave it, that even as I finish reading it, I already want to return it. It means that along with the passion of the initial rapture there is also a peace that is intuitively recognized as lasting. This is true love for me. I only want to add that true love is subjective. There are “classics” that I don’t love and there are what many would consider poorly written books that I love with all my heart. With these last kind there is a recognition of souls that takes places that pierces through the surface. May our hearts be always full of love.
November 28, 2009
November 5, 2009
The Writer as Talker
Every once in a while I get invited to talk at various types of events. I don’t know exactly why, but whenever I finish my talk, I feel a mild sense of disgust at myself. Part of the problem is that one of the reasons I get invited in the first place is to talk about my books and about myself and so what I say sounds (at least to me) like so much ego-puffing and self-promotion. Professors and other scholarly types get to talk about a topic that doesn’t have anything to do with themselves. But what can I talk about other than writing and the writing process and the themes treated in my books? I feel like I should quickly become an expert and come up with a general topic such as: “Jung, the collective unconscious, and the prevalence of vampires in young adult literature.” Was there ever a time when an author wrote and the book went off and that was it? I’m only complaining a little bit. Because Marcelo has something like Asperger’s syndrome, I’ve been invited to speak to organizations that are interested or involved with AS. A week or so I spoke before the Asperger’s Association of New England and got some of very tough questions from young people with AS who had read the book with an incredible eye for detail. A couple of months ago, I was invited to a class at the Perkins School in Lancaster Massachusetts, where young people with AS had studied the book. I walk away from talks like these enriched. Drained but enriched. Sometimes I think that there’s only enough energy in the creative reservoir and you can use it either to write or to talk about writing. There are times when it feels right to talk about my writing and my books and there are times when it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe I haven’t quite found the perspective that sees talking as reaching out, as being generous, as an expression of gratitude for the publication and interest in my books. But even if I manage to see talking in the right light, I hope to always remember that writing comes first and talking second.
