Write for God

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
 

The first time I read Emily Dickinson’s celebration of the power of books I had to look up most of the words in the poem. I must have been in middle school when I read it and perhaps older when I finally understood it.

I’ve been a reader since I was four.  My mother said I was precocious and begged to be taught to read. When I was a child in Havana, Cuba, I spent days with my grandparents, aunt and great-aunt while my parents worked. Afternoons after our midday dinner were spent napping or discussing the events in the newspaper or the Voice of America broadcasts furtively picked up from U.S. stations. I wanted to be part of the news discussions going on and being able to read the paper seemed like the quickest way to be included.

Books have always been a part of my life. More than 45 years after I learned to read, I’ve ridden many of Dickinson’s frigates to far-off lands in my mind. When a book becomes one of my favorites, I’ll read it every year or every other year to experience the original pleasure I found there. Every now and then, I’ll read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience; George Orwell’s 1984; the Gospel According to St. John in the New American Bible; Thomas Merton’s Fire Watch essay and John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, which is probably the funniest book ever written.

Without a new book to read, I’m bored. When I was in parochial school, I made my way through a beautiful series of fairy tales with books that had colored covers. I spent hours curled up by the window reading them. Novels, history, biographies, memoirs: the genre doesn’t matter as long as the author tells a compelling tale.

I like to read as my mood dictates, so there are always several books going near my reading chair. Depending on my state of mind, I’ll pick up one where I left it off and enter the world created by the writer. Reading just one book at a time would be too normal.

Right now, I’m reading six books that are intriguing for different reasons. The newest one in the stack is Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories From a Fading Empire by veteran community organizer Bruce Gagnon. I’m always drawn to stories about people whose epiphanies spin them into another direction. Gagnon, who is now the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, began as a Republican serving in the Air Force and transformed himself into a organizer with the United Farm Workers Union and eventually to fighting the military empire that wants to militarize space.

I’m also reading the newly arrived Collected Poems by the late Robert Hayden, the gifted poet I discovered this month and whom I wrote about in my January 12 entry. As the kids were getting haircuts today, I savored Hayden’s vivid images.

For inspiration, I’m reading William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well, which I’ve read regularly since I was in high school. There’s no better book to cut the chaff from sentences and to whittle bulging phrases. 

There’s also The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which is one of the best books on plotting novels and screenplays. It dissects the conventions of myths to come up with stories that speak to everyone.

Just for fun, I’m reading Rip-Offs: a Writer’s Guide to Crimes of Deception by Fay Faron. If you’ve ever wondered about scams such as the Spanish Prisoner and Bible Bunco, this book explains what they are and how they’re perpetrated by those who’ll do anything for an illegal buck.

I’m still working my way through the bilingual edition of Dante’s Paradiso, the most mystical of the three books in the Commedia. As Dante ascends to the highest heavens with Beatrice, his language and the cosmology becomes more sophisticated. It’s a work that can’t be rushed.

The collection that contains The Light Over the Scaffold and Cell 18, prison letters by Jacques Fesch, is also on my reading pile. Fesch, who was executed on the month I was born in 1957, killed a policeman after a failed robbery attempt. He went to prison and spent months in isolation, where he found God. His spiritual growth was assisted by the prison chaplain and a monk with whom he corresponded. The letters are remarkable testaments to the power of Jesus to bring sinners to new life. One day, Fesch may be canonized.

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is the droll apocalyptic “Time Enough at Last.” Henry Beemis, a meek, bespectacled bank teller played by Burgess Meredith, escapes his boss and his shrewish wife by locking himself in the vault at work to read. When a nuclear explosion destroys the planet, he’s safe in his reinforced reading place. He emerges to an empty world with no harping bosses or wives, but with a library full of books for his enjoyment. As he settles in to read, his coke-bottom glasses fall and break. Suddenly, the meek little man experiences his own Armageddon.

I’ve always thought that was the saddest of the Twilight Zones. A world without books would be barren for me and I’m grateful that I can make time enough to read and lose myself in the voyages I’ve taken on those frigates that have taken me lands away without leaving my reading chair.