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one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.
The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways—that’s just the nature of unforeseen ways.
Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.
There’s a W. H. Auden poem called “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht. In it is a description of a painting by Brueghel, in which the old master depicts Icarus falling from the sky while everyone else, involved in other things or simply not wanting to know, “turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster” and goes about daily tasks. I thought about that poem a lot over the next few days of the fair as I chatted about books, kept my appointments, and ate frankfurters off cardboard-thin crackers. The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, /
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Why did I always need to do something, like referring one person to another, just for the sake of doing something, when sometimes, perhaps, it was better to do nothing?
We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can’t; and the ones they make thinking they can’t and only later come to understand, when it’s too late, when “nothing can be undone,” that they could have.
Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn’t decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary.
don’t like being interrupted either—but I interrupt other people. I often forget that other people’s stories aren’t simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.
“That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”
Almost all the earliest conversations I remember with my parents were about books:
“The world is complicated,” she added. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”
“What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.
Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren’t aware of it.”
I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom’s dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.
I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.
Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”
As a reader, you’re often inside one or more characters’ heads, so you know what they’re feeling, even if they can’t exactly say it, or they say it so obliquely that the other characters don’t catch it. Readers are frequently reminded of the gulf between what people say and what they mean, and such moments prod us to become more attuned to gesture, tone, and language. After all, we each reveal ourselves through a dizzying number of what poker players call “tells”—verbal and visual clues that display true intention to anyone observant enough to notice them.
Kabat-Zinn points out that we all know it’s wrong to interrupt each other. And yet we constantly interrupt ourselves. We do it when we check our emails incessantly—or won’t simply let a phone go to voicemail when we’re doing something we enjoy—or when we don’t think a thought through, but allow our minds to fix on temporary concerns or desires.
joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.
“I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. I
There is no place more perfectly lonely than an airport at night when you fear someone you love is dying and you’re rushing to see that person.
Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others.
