On days when fishing is out of the question and the 24/7 news has taken its circuitous route about dozen times and the SEC channel is showing decades-old football games, Sam opens a book. While he sits reading on one end of the couch, Jack, the cat, keeps company on the other end.
When I arrive home, Sam assures me that each has kept to their own end of the couch and that no fusses broke out and that they may have watched an episode or two of National Geographic “Wild,” or “Wicked Tuna.”
Recently, Sam read “The Judas Field, A Novel of the Civil War,” by Mississippi native Howard Bahr. He spent several days intently reading the novel, describing it as good, detailed and well written. Then he added, “It’s a very sad book. There’s so much killing, and for what?” he asked rhetorically.
I noticed during that same period Sam complained of not feeling well. When asked the source of his malaise there was no specific answer. “Just aches and pains, maybe a fever.” We discussed his going to the doctor but delayed. He said he didn’t need medicine, he just didn’t feel good and the weather was nasty. Maybe it was the wet, cold winter.
Throughout his reading Sam reported this or that about the storyline but otherwise said very little until he read the last page and closed the book.
“It was a hard book to read,” he said. “There was so much killing. It was a hard life, and it didn’t end well.”
“The young boy you told me about? What happened to him?”
Sam’s eyes teared up, and his voice cracked, “He didn’t make it. And the trouble is, it is happening all over again. All over the world it’s happening right now.”
I flashed back to 1977 when I read Colleen McCullough’s “The Thorn Birds.” For a couple of weeks I asked myself why I was so melancholy, so depressed. There was no reason for being so, then I realized it was the book. I was so “into” the book that I had taken on the sadness of a story set in Australia.
C.S. Lewis says that reading literature enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own,” and enter “fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings, and total experience” of others. (“If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis,” by Alister McGrath.)
To enter into another place, time and people is certainly a good thing. And a writer that can so evoke emotion as to make you feel you are present is a good writer. And the ability to close the last page, to walk outside and be grateful for a blue sky, a daffodil pushing through the frozen ground and the beauty of another day is of all things … a good day.
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