Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
Diana Gabaldon. The Fiery Cross
You know you’ve been reading a lot (too much?) historical fiction when you have a bad bump, see the bruise brewing in the swelling of the skin and you think, “Damn. That’s going to be a nasty bruise. If I could get a leech on it right now, it would be fine.”
Yes.
True story.
I was driving home while listening to the audio book of Diana Gabaldon’s Dragonfly in Amber. It’s a brisk December day, -3 Celsius.
At this point in the story, the narrator was discussing about how the day of the Battle of Culloden was bitterly cold. Immediately, in my mind, I envisioned a bitterly cold day. -20 or so. The next line was about how the bodies were stacked wet with blood and rain. Rain. Immediately, I adjusted my vision of the cold 21 degrees warmer…
Then I laughed. So much of the story is contained in the perspective of the reader. I know it intellectually, but it always seems to take me by surprise when I see it in action.
A couple of times I’ve had comments from readers of Grace Awakening that baffled me. Sometimes they’ve just misinterpreted something, or missed some detail, but often it is just that their life experience reveals a different view on the events. It’s interesting.
Bitter cold doesn’t need to be -20 of course. I spent a July in Vancouver one year, and the humidity of the city got into my bones and I was cold all the time. It was much worse than the -20 winter days! Living in the dry interior of BC, I don’t like humidity. Perhaps the weather at Culloden, not far from Inverness and the Channel, was that ‘get into your bones’ bitterness, even though it was above zero.
Adjust while reading.
Carry on.
Fictional voices
I understand the call of the other world
The voices beckoning
“Stay!”
Sometimes it’s hard to leave them,
To return to a world of responsibility
Of real hurt
Of real anguish
Of real love.
The world between the pages
Invades dreams
Fills days,
Creates a longing
That is only fulfilled
By words.
26.10.2011
Lost wanderer,
head in clouds,
still travelling fictional roads
though the covers are closed.
Slowly moving through today,
heart heavy
from a world spun from words.
Fiction being truth,
when living between pages
for several days,
rousing reality
proves difficult.
.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.
Do you ever find yourself feeling something akin to culture shock when you emerge from several days of reading- reading book after book from a single series until the fictional world in your head is more real than the world your body habitates?
As you try to pull your head back from where it is still lost between pages, does your heart ache to be back in that place? Even while you’re full of knowing that the place exists only in your imagination, crafted from the imagination of another, do you feel it is yours as much as the creators, because you’ve journeyed together?
I have the same feeling coming home after a time abroad. Finding myself takes time. Good thing there is a waiting list for the next book in Diana Gabaldon‘s Outlander series. After reading 2 books (1800 pages) over the last 4 days, I’m quite emotionally exhausted.
One of my favorite movies is the 1995 version of Sabrina, with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormand. The obsessive adoration and the surprise of overlooking a greater love plays right into my romantic sensibilities. I love the close relationship between Sabrina and her father, the chauffeur. When she has returned, transformed, from Paris and is sorting out her new world, she observes,
I love so many things about you, Dad. But you know what I love best of all? You became a chauffeur because you wanted to have time to read. All my life, I’ve pictured you… sitting in the front seat of a long succession of cars… waiting for the Larrabees and reading. (Sabrina, 1995)
This quote is interesting for a few reasons.
First, of course, it points to the concept that the desire to read, to know, to experience can be so overwhelming that it fills a life. I spend much of my summers reading, and at the moment I’ve been reading so much that my eyes are aching and puffy. I love that idea of having a job that leaves lots of time to explore new worlds.
Second, is the idea of choosing a job that allows you do what you love. Sabrina’s father, Thomas Fairchild, loves to read. He could have found a job as an editor, perhaps, but then he wouldn’t get to choose what he reads. Instead, he found a job that involves so much waiting, that there was always ample opportunity to be reading.
As an added plus, he was able to hear so much stock information from the back seat, he was able to earn a fortune while he lived above the garage and read between the commutes. The message is, if you choose to do what you love, and pay attention to other opportunities, you can make a perfect life for yourself.
I’m glad to have a job that I love.
It’s not worth the cash to do something you dislike just for the money.
Quality of life is important. Do what you love.
I received this tweet from @Libarbarian Peter Bailey:
“Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book”.
How true is that? This is the best way to explain why we love to read, isn’t it?
If someone isn’t a reader, he is never going to be able to see other perspectives, choices and possibilities as well as someone who’s had the opportunity to live through them in a character’s life.
We have lifetimes to explore, and between the pages of a book, we can experience them all. It gives us a wider range of tools to draw on as we sort out our own complicated lives. Reading is practice for reality.
The problem with spending time in a fantasy world is that sometimes it’s very hard to leave and return to the world of reality.
I have a friend who was raised in a huge Catholic family. Her dad was an illiterate farmer. He valued farm chores. He did not value education, and he especially did not value reading. Being discovered shirking one’s chores with a book was asking for a beating. I can kind of appreciate the anger. When your children have escaped into a book or movie, they are out of your control. They are being exposed to ideas that may differ from your own. A lot of people fear ideas that are different from their own, and that is why we have censorship. Ideas are free. Control is not.
I came out of the Eclipse matinee today, lost in the world of love, hard decisions, glorious Pacific scenery (the very roads of the Fraser Valley that we were driving last spring break), and the passions of youth. I have felt a little bittersweet all day, as I fight not to go back and read through the series again. (I just read them all last weekend for about the twentieth time, afterall, and I watched the movies 3X this week already). My emotions have been highjacked by Twilight again. It doesn’t matter that it has been a long time since I was engulfed in those passions of new love and the difficult decisions that last a lifetime, but it doesn’t seem like it. Whether those feelings were thirty years ago or three years ago, the intensity of them doesn’t change. Auntie Bright and Grace discuss this at the end of Grace Awakening,
. “Have you heard how the archaeologists have excavated three thousand year old honey from within the pyramids?”
(Grace) nodded and whispered, “Yes, they discovered it was still perfect, because bacteria don’t grow on honey.”
“Exactly. Like ancient honey, a first love remains ever incorruptible despite the passage of time. Though the boy may no longer exist, the memory of him is always pure and sweet.”
Like Bright, I’m feeling somewhat lost at the moment in the ache and joy of nostalgia. Those intense feelings are always just below the surface, and the Twilight Saga has woken them for many women, of all ages. Whether our heads remember all the details, our hearts recall each nuance of confusion, joy and adoration. Stephenie Meyer’s created world pushes us back to that place. It can be a wonderful place to revisit. Being in love has a narcotic effect on the system. It does us good to re-awaken those passions by escaping from our dreary every day.
Perhaps someone watching my vacant stares and unexplained flashes of smiles might be distressed. Perhaps that fact that my thoughts are unknown would pain some people. Not being quite in control of your head can be a problem. On the other hand, it is amazing as a writer to know that words have that kind of power! I bow to the brilliance that can take control of my emotions away from me, and remind me of love’s power.
.
I am so glad to have spent the last twenty-five years with the amazing and brilliant man who happily attends Twilight movies with me, discusses books, gives me valuable writing critiques, tolerates my foibles, loves me beyond reason, and yes, does laundry. What a blessing I’ve been given. I am reminded of this whenever I float out of the cloud of love and adoration rekindled by Twilight.
.
I hope Grace Awakening leaves readers in a haze, wishing they were still lost in the story, spending time with Grace, Ben, Bright, Jim and the others. I hope they find themselves in the realm of memory, remembering the boys and men who first touched their hearts and awakened them to the grace of love. I hope the fantasy rekindles their hearts to their reality.
Fine: if you’re still reading, then I’ll trust we have a bargain. You will not judge—and I will tell the truth. Or at least you will withhold your judgement as far as seems humanly possibly—which is seldom very far—and I will tell as much truth as can reasonably be expected from a man—which is seldom as much as one might hope—and between us we’ll do the best we can. (Ian Weir in Daniel O’Thunder p. 8.)
It is an interesting bargain that is struck between writer and reader. The reader agrees to suspend belief, so long as the writer crafts a believable world. The art is taking the reader on a journey of the imagination that stretches so tightly it almost snaps. When the leap is too great, the reader puts down the book in disgust and may not return to it.
Ian Weir’s Daniel O’Thunder is a lovely book. I don’t want to mislead you into thinking it is full of sweetness and light, because it is a dark book full of poverty, murder, shame and the blackness of evil, but it is beautifully crafted. There is poetry in every line. Weir took me on a journey and surprised me. His narrator, who breaks the literary equivalent of the ‘4th wall’ to address us throughout the novel, is quite an enigma. Unreliable narrators are so much more painfully realistic than reliable ones!
Weir’s narrator takes us on a journey, that amid the surprises (and a token ending in BC that seemed all about qualifying for grants or awards!) leads to contemplation of evil and spirituality. He may break the contract (see what you think!) but he’s too interesting for you to be concerned.
What literary journeys have you had to abandon? What writer broke the contract and made you so irritated that you couldn’t go on?
Shawn L. Bird 
reminding yourself of who you are November 25, 2011
Tags: immersion, postaday2011, reading, reality, Richard Armitage, theatre, writing
When I’ve been involved in musical productions, it’s always been depressing the first day after the show closes to find yourself again. Those with romantic roles tend to find themselves a little in love with their show paramour for awhile. The rest of the cast tends to wander about dazedly wondering what they’re going to do to fill their days now.
I’ve written previously about this feeling when emerging out of a particularly in depth literary immersion. I think this is true when you are a writer, as well. When you are wrapped up tightly in your in your alternate world, it can be a difficult transition to return to the mundane realities.
What power has the imagination to fuel such alternate visions, and to put them all into our heads. We carry our own ‘holodecks’ of possibility. We can create our own world of romance, joy, and comedy. We can create our own horror drama. How important it is to make the best choice, to make our lives the best we can imagine them to be! If reality doesn’t suit, we can imagine a better life.
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