Concord, MA

Today involved lots of geeking out and extreme amounts of excitement: I visited Concord, MA, home of Louisa May Alcott. My love for Little Women is so deep, personal and abiding that I have a hard time explaining it to other people. Visiting Orchard House was an experience beyond my capacity to fully describe.

I've been pretty low-key, zen even, about my trip so far. I'm not too intent on seeing anything and if things have fallen through, I haven't really cared. The only things I've insisted I needed to see while I was out here were Orchard House and Walden Pond. I knew I was excited to see these things, but even I was surprised at my own enthusiasm today. Just driving into Concord and seeing the streets got my adrenaline going. I couldn't stop smiling when I saw Orchard House appear through the trees. I made my friend take several pictures of me standing in front of the house before we even found the entrance to the visitor's center. I also texted one of these pictures to each of my eight siblings, so they could know I was experiencing such a momentous moment (redundant, but whatevs).

There were only four of us on the tour and it was the first time through the home for all of us. As we were introducing ourselves, one of the women there said, "It's kind of a really big deal for me to be here, so if I start crying, don't worry." I laughed, but mostly because I understood that I might burst into tears at any moment as well.

The house was lovely, although very different inside than the one featured in the Winona Ryder movie. The outside was essentially the same, but the inside was set up differently. The highlight of the tour was seeing the actual desk where Little Women was written. I don't know why it matters so much to see the desk, but it did. I stared at it for a good long while.

In the course of the tour, I learned a few interesting things I hadn't known before:

• The real Meg, Anna Alcott, was an actress who met her husband, John, while performing opposite him in a play in Concord.

• The real Amy, May, was an accomplished enough artist that hers was the only work by an American woman accepted in a prestigious French art exhibition.

• May was also the first art teacher of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial.

• The Winona Ryder movie was actually filmed in Alaska.

Okay, that last part is probably not true, but our tour guide did say that--even though she followed it up with a "Actually, that's not true."

After Orchard House, we saw Sleepy Hollow cemetery where Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott are all buried. (Daniel Chester French is actually buried there too.) It was really creepy in an awesome way and I was glad I wasn't there alone and it wasn't dark. We were even approached by a man carrying around a black cat who wanted to tell us more about Daniel Chester French. Odd. But I loved it.

We followed up the cemetery with lunch at a little cafe, a quick drive-by look at the Old North Bridge ("the shot heard round the world"), and then a visit to Walden Pond.

I loved Walden Pond. It's huge and beautiful and I can see why Henry David moved down there. I was ready to move into the nearby woods myself. His little shanty looked quite comfortable (actually, it was just a replica--the real one was disassembled for use as firewood and the roof of it was put on a pigsty--really). Maybe I'll build my own up Provo Canyon. It would solve my I-don't-know-where-I'm-going-to-live-this-fall problem so nicely. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . . " I could do that for two years and two months and two days.

I wish I could post some of the lovely pictures I took there, but alas. You'll see them soon.

Tomorrow, I'll actually go into Boston proper!

favorite books

Probably because I am (was?) an English major, people often ask me about my favorite books--a question I don't find it easy to answer.

Wayne Booth says that books are like friends: each one offers a different experience. When you sit down with a book, you sit down with a particular type of experience. Rather than having favorite books, then, I have books that I return to again and again for particular types of experience. I have books for comfort (Little Women or An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott), books for nostalgia (Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery), books for hard thinking (anything by Kenneth Burke), books for not thinking (Ella Enchanted), books for fun (Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling), books for inspiration (Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindburgh or A Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle), and books for pure, unadulterated pleasure (Emma or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen). All of these books provide me with the particular experience I need when I need it--they're all favorites in that sense, but I can't really call any of them my favorite book.

There are a few books, however, that I do at various times apply the title of favorite to when I have to answer the question. And they are these:

And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

I love these books. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is about these books that puts them on the top of my favorites list. I realize that the experience offered by each of these books, although different, somehow link together for me. All of them provide me with a spiritual reading experience--an experience I'm not sure how to describe. Romans 8:16 talks about how the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, telling us things about ourselves in a way that transcends verbal communication. These books speak to my spirit, which is why I call my experience with them spiritual. All of them have played an essential role in shaping the way I think about and interact with the world around me. I remember distinctly my first experience reading each of them.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia first when I was eleven. I cried when Aslan sacrificed himself in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I recognized the clear parallel with Christian theology, and wondered if it was sacrilegious that I was crying for the lion. That moment marked the beginning of my understanding of the Atonement of Christ. When I read about Shasta's long walk with the Lion and the stripes on Aravis' back in The Horse and His Boy (my favorite of all the Chronicles), I imagined my own walk with God and what He might tell me about my journey. Aslan represented to me a very personal, very loving, very tangible view of God. I love these books for teaching me that God has a personality.

I read Les Miserables (complete and unabridged) for the first time when I was fourteen. I remember staying up until 4am one night to finish it and bawling through Jean Valjean's death. I had a headache all the next day because of too little sleep and too much crying. It was the book that really made me fall in love with reading--with the experience of losing myself in another's persons words, words that became mine too as I read them. I decided to major in English after reading Les Miserables.

As for And There Was Light, this book impacted me perhaps the most of all. It's the autobiography of a boy who was blinded at the age of seven and went on to lead a major resistance against Hitler during the German occupation of France. I read it when I was sixteen.

How can you resist a book that contains these opening lines?:

As I remember it, my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy.

I think it was in August 2001 that I read And There Was Light. In September 2001, the words of Jacques Lusseyran would play through my head as I tried to process the tragedy of 9/11. Here he is describing how he mentally survived his interrogation from the SS:

One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don't go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong, you will be weak. If you try to understand, you will go crazy. 

No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product--I can't define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in the moment. Don't be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it. 

Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse. If you are a scholar--there is a gimmick for every category--do what I did that night. Reconstruct, out loud, Kant's arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don't believe any of it. Don't even believe in yourself. Only God exists. (245)

This book came to me during perhaps the most difficult year of my life and it taught me that it's important not just to cope with adversity. We must learn to thrive in spite of it and see the beauty available even in ugly times.

The fact that I read all of these "favorite" books at very formative ages says something about why the experience of reading them is still so special to me when I go back to them years later. Sometimes, as a jaded MA, schooled in the ability to maintain critical distance, I miss the magic (and, yes, I mean magic) of handing myself over to a book--of making myself vulnerable to all the emotions it asks me to feel and losing myself in believing it--in its honest expression of the thoughts and feelings of another human being and in the honesty and literalness of my own reading of it. I hadn't learned to really question books when I was teenager, so I simply experienced them. Sometimes experiencing them meant making them over in my own image and reading my own experiences and feelings into them perhaps too much, but isn't that the magic of reading? That uncritical process of connecting my spirit with the undefinable spirit of the book is what made reading so personal and so valuable. That was how I read when I was eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. And when I revisit these books, I can read like that again. I go back to them for that experience--the spiritual experience of reading.

What are your favorite books? And what experiences have they offered you?

The new face of Jane Austen

Look at this:



Now look at this:



You know you need to fear for the literacy of American youth when people feel the need to make a Jane Austen novel look as if it were written by Stephenie Meyer.

A Sunday afternoon with Madeleine L'Engle

Yesterday, I read Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. I've had this book in my collection for nearly ten years, but this is the first time I've read it, and now I know what I've been missing. It's a thoughtful, spiritual book that explores some of the more difficult questions about suffering in this life--the kind of questions I wished we talked about more often in Sunday school. L'Engle's contemplation of marriage in this book reminded me of Stegner's in Crossing to Safety (another great book). My copy of the L'Engle book is now littered with post-it notes marking insights that struck me, like this one:

"As a human parent I have had to allow my children to make their own mistakes, to become free adults. I cannot rush in and correct every error in judgment, fix everything that goes wrong. Parents who attempt to do that usually end up with children who grow into emotional cripples. If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us" (99).

I love this idea that even in the moments when God comes in to rescue or help us, He does so with His eternal purposes in mind. He won't deviate from what is best from us, and the reason for that is so that we can become more mature and more real. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel like we're not being rescued--that we're being allowed to flounder--because God's goal is not to save us from pain, but to allow the pain to purify us until we're changed, inside and out--until we're more expansive as human beings, and not less so.

Wanted: a nice man

"A woman should have the same chances in the professions as a man. But a woman's work about the house is never ending; the care of a child is the sweetest of professions; and that woman is neglectful of her best interests who goes out into the world to work when she can get a nice man to do the work for her."

--Sarah Grand (1854-1943), feminist activist

Oh, the gems you find when you're writing a paper titled "Women's Heads Weren't Made for Thinking"!

Good book

So after my 9:30 class this morning, when I was supposed to be working on a paper on Kenneth Burke's view of rhetoric and poetics, I read this book:



I think I can safely say it's the best Mormon teen fiction I've ever read, and one of the better young adult novels I've read in general. Check it out. Now on to Kenneth Burke, much less pleasant reading . . .