Books for Living
There’s a chapter about a friend of his, a fellow soldier, who died not in battle but of illness in our author’s arms in their winter quarters. He misses the friendship dreadfully, and one of the most moving passages in the book is the trip he makes across his room to his desk in order to visit his old friend’s letters.
Another surprise comes when our traveler ponders people with more luxurious digs. It seems at first like other flip and offhand sections of the book. But then comes this passage:
And why would I bother to consider those who are in a more agreeable situation, when the world is swarming with people who are more unhappy than me? Instead of transporting myself in my imagination into that superb casin [villa], where so many beauties are eclipsed by young Eugénie, if I wish to consider myself happy, I need only pause awhile on the roads that lead there. A heap of unfortunate folk, lying half naked under the porches of those sumptuous apartments, seem on the point of expiring from cold and misery. What a sight! I wish this page of my book could be known throughout the world; I would like it to be known that, in this city—where everything breathes opulence—during the coldest winter nights, a host of wretches sleep out in the open, with only a boundary stone or the threshold of some palace on which to lay their heads.
Here you see a group of children huddling close together so as not to die of the cold. There it’s a woman, shivering and voiceless to complain. The passers-by come and go, quite untouched by a sight to which they are used.
Just as many travel writers before and after have done, de Maistre brought light to the injustices he witnessed, though in this case they were literally on his doorstep. His point: you don’t have to travel the world to see the ways we mistreat one another; it’s as close as the street outside our windows.
But when he wants to be awakened to what is going on in the world far from his window, and learn more about the human condition, there is another destination in his room that he can visit—his bookshelf, which is filled mostly with novels and a few books of poetry. These take him out of his room while allowing him to stay in it, and expand his experiences a thousandfold. He writes, “As if my own troubles weren’t enough, I also voluntarily share those of a thousand imaginary characters, and I feel them as vividly as my own.”
The day finally comes when de Maistre is allowed to leave his home, but he describes that day as the one on which his true imprisonment, which is like being “shackled in chains,” resumes: “The yoke of business is going to weigh down on me once again; I will no longer be able to take a single step that isn’t traced out for me by propriety and duty.”
It’s only in his room, with his memories and books and his window, that he feels truly free.
After reading A Journey Around My Room, I vowed that I would take a trip to my room every few months, and these have been some of the happiest days I’ve spent. It’s an incredible luxury to be home and not sick, to wake up with no agenda other than to wander around the apartment all day. I can lie on the sofa and look at the light as it plays across a glass table. Or see the way it catches on a cracked ceramic vase. I can play with the shells I’ve brought back from the beach. I can admire our hearty little African violet. And I can visit my books, flipping through this one and then that to light on a passage.
This only works if I remain totally unplugged. The rules for such a day are simple—no electronics at all (except for music).
I’m finding that on a slow, lazy day, when I’m a traveler in my own home, just about anything I touch is new to me, as I see it differently than I have before, but each object also brings back memories, as I recall how I came to have it. On these days I spend touring my apartment, I almost always visit the letters I’ve saved, especially those from David Baer, my friend who died when we were in our twenties. As de Maistre writes about the letters from his friend, “What an intense, melancholy pleasure it feels when my eyes run over the lines traced by someone who is no longer alive.”
De Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room was a huge success in his life. Years after he wrote the book, he decided to follow it with a companion volume, a sequel of sorts, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. This is a shorter and more philosophical work. In it, he journeys to the stars, simply by staring out his window at the spectacular beauty of the night sky.
He writes that he understands that most people don’t see the stars because they are sleeping when the stars are out. But what he can barely comprehend is why anyone awake and wandering around at night would forget to look up and marvel at them. His theory is that since people can see the sky so often, and all for free, they can’t be bothered to look.
De Maistre writes (in a tone of righteous indignation) that if he were the sovereign of some country, “every night I would have the alarm bell rung, and I would oblige my subjects of every age, every sex and every condition to go to their windows and look at the stars.”
But then he engages himself in an argument with Reason, who insists on exceptions to the decree. What if it’s raining? Or too cold? Or there’s a chill? And shouldn’t the ill be exempt? And lovers, too?
All good points.
As for us, now, we live in a world that is largely without stars. The light pollution all around us, in every city around the globe, makes them hard to see. On most nights, you can’t view them from a room in New York or Hong Kong or London. You can barely see them in many of the world’s smaller cities and towns. You might have to go far into the countryside to see the full grandeur of the night sky.
But de Maistre’s principal point remains unchanged. Even if the stars are obliterated by light, there are beautiful things to see all around us, and we can’t be bothered. But it’s not because we are ill, most of us. Or because it’s too cold. Or because we are blind with love. Or even because we spend so much time looking at little screens. It’s because we are often so busy and distracted and self-absorbed that we can’t be bothered to see what is right in front of us, in our rooms, on our streets, in the air.
The fault is not in our stars—or in our screens—but in ourselves.
Death Be Not Proud
Praying
IT’S CURIOUS how much time I spend reading prayers, since I don’t consider myself to be very religious. I look for them everywhere and keep in my knapsack a handsome red leather-bound book of prayers from my Episcopal high school. A favorite is one from the Book of Common Prayer that has us ask forgiveness for having “left undone those things we ought to have done and done those things that we ought not to have done.” When I’m experiencing free-floating remorse I read that prayer. It’s like a broad-spectrum antibiotic. It takes care of just about anything and everything.
My mind is especially open to prayer when I’m reading a book: it’s quiet, attentive, focused. Not so much when I’m on the Web or flipping through a magazine. And while I do like books of prayers, I have discovered many of the prayers I like best in novels and works of nonfiction and collections of poetry.
One of the prayers I turn to most often comes from a book about a boy named Johnny Gunther.
For me, Johnny Gunther will always be seventeen, a contemporary, just a few years older than I was when I first met him in the pages of Death Be Not Proud, just a few years older than my boarding-school classmate Lee Harkins was when she died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But Johnny wasn’t our contemporary; he was my father’s. Johnny was born in 1929, my dad in 1927. If Johnny were alive today, he would be eighty-seven, maybe with grandchildren the age he was when he first got a stiff neck that turned out to be something far worse: a brain tumor.
In Death Be Not Proud, his father, journalist and author John Gunther, chronicles the last fifteen months of his son’s life. There is little of the life before: a speedy introductory chapter introduces you to this handsome young man with beautiful hands. And there are a few chapters after Johnny dies, which include some of his letters and his diary entries, and in which his mother writes about her devastating grief—the pain she gets from seeing things that her
son loved or would have loved, and her regrets:
I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive. Of course we loved Johnny very much. Johnny knew that. Everybody knew it. Loving Johnny more. What does it mean? What can it mean, now?
Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one’s fellow human beings, of the earth.
It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.
It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth. It means caring more about God.
Johnny Gunther and I had little in common when I first read his story. As noted, he wasn’t of my generation; the war his mother refers to is World War II. His parents were divorced; mine weren’t. He was passionate about chemistry and science; both subjects baffled me. But I still identified with him keenly. And I also had more than a little crush on him. That’s part of the magic of the book—everyone I know who has read this book feels the same way about Johnny.
In one of those odd synchronies that keep happening to readers, I discovered on rereading Death Be Not Proud that young Johnny, at age ten, met Lin Yutang. John Gunther tells a story of his son approaching Dr. Lin, “the first Chinese he had ever met,” at a lunch party and going right up to him to ask, “Is it true what my father says, that no Chinese ever eat cheese?” If Gunther was mortified, he doesn’t say. But he does tell what happened next: “Dr. Lin ruined my authority as a parent by walking firmly to the buffet and putting a large piece of cheese in his mouth.”
Death Be Not Proud has some light moments, but it is mostly a painful book. Gunther lays out the events of those last fifteen months as a great reporter would. The painful head shavings, the surgeries, the bandaging, the discovery of an ever-worsening prognosis, the miraculous months when Johnny defied all predictions and rallied—Gunther chronicles them all. Johnny is almost preternaturally brave. Reading this book, as a teen, I wanted to be like Johnny should I ever encounter anything like what he encountered. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be—but I wanted to try. Johnny is also curious, eager to know the whys and wherefores of every procedure, though his parents do frequently shield him from the worst news. Still, he’s at heart a scientist—and he figures things out.
Johnny doesn’t live long enough to go to Harvard, where he’s been admitted. But he is able, though terribly ill, to attend his boarding-school graduation.
His father writes:
As each boy passed down the aisle, there was applause, perfunctory for some, pronounced for others. Gaines, Gillespie, Goodwin, Griffin, Gunther. Slowly, very slowly, Johnny stepped out of the mass of his fellows and trod by us, carefully keeping in the exact center of the long aisle, looking neither to the left nor the right, but straight ahead, fixedly, with the white bandage flashing in the light through the high windows, his chin up, carefully, not faltering, steady, but slowly, so very slowly. The applause began and then rose and the applause became a storm, as every single person in the old church became whipped up, tight and tense, to see if he would make it. The applause became a thunder, it rose and soared and banged, when Johnny finally reached the pulpit. Mr. Flynt carefully tried to put the diploma in his right hand, as planned. Firmly Johnny took it from right hand to left, as was proper, and while the whole audience rocked now with release from tension, and was still wildly, thunderously applauding, he passed around to the side and, not seeing us, reached his place among his friends.
When my own ghosts come, the images of friends I’ve lost young, Johnny Gunther joins them. I must confess that when I see him it’s not as he really looked—it’s in the image of an actor named Robby Benson who played him in a movie. But he’s there all the same. His father was one of America’s most famous authors and I don’t think about him at all—I think about his son. John Gunther ensured that his child would have a kind of immortality he himself doesn’t.
The book’s epigraph is the John Donne poem from which Gunther took the title: “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” The poem famously ends with the couplet “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!”
Someone told me that if you want to know what a book is really about just read the last word. The last word of Death Be Not Proud comes from the chapter that Johnny’s mother wrote. That word is “life.”
But that’s not the last last word. Gunther gives that to his son, who wrote, shortly after his diagnosis, a prayer. What made this particularly noteworthy, his father tells us, is that his son never prayed. Gunther speculates that Johnny’s aversion to prayer may have stemmed from the fact that he so disliked going to chapel at his grade school and harbored considerable “resentment at having been obliged to spend a good deal of time listening to organized religious exhortation.” So his mother, Frances, introduced him to all different kinds of prayers to counteract that early inculcation: “Hindu, Chinese, and so on, as well as Jewish and Christian. He was interested in all this, but it did not mean very much to him at first. Then she started him on Aldous Huxley’s anthology of prayer, The Perennial Philosophy, and told him how intimate and very personal prayer could be. Once she suggested that if it should ever occur to him to think of a prayer himself, of his own special kind, he should tell her. So, very casually, with an ‘Oh, by the way…’ expression, he said, ‘Speaking of prayers, I did think one up.’ He recited it and only disclosed later that he had previously written it down and memorized it.”
UNBELIEVER’S PRAYER
Almighty God
forgive me for my agnosticism;
For I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical,
nor a bad influence
And O!
if Thou art truly in the heavens,
accept my gratitude
for all Thy gifts
and I shall try
to fight the good fight. Amen.
What the Living Do
Living
THE PRIMARY reason I first turn to any book is curiosity. I wonder what will be inside it. Or I wonder why someone I know and trust loves it. Or I wonder why everyone I know loathes it. Or I’ve read the cover copy and wonder how our heroine’s life “will be changed forever” after she encounters whatever it is the flap-copy writer has said she will encounter. Or I wonder why this book remains on shelves hundreds of years after it was written, or why I’ve never heard of it before, or why an author I love has mentioned it on the radio, or why it caught my attention at a particular moment.
And my primary emotion at the start of any book is hope—hope that it will teach me something or delight me in some way. From the delightful books, I almost always learn something, even if it’s just how to experience delight. That’s a bonus. Good books often answer questions you didn’t even know you wanted to ask.
Once, on a breezy day, I met a woman in a small bookstore after a reading. She looked to be somewhere in her sixties. She told me that she had just lost her husband. She said she had never been a big nonfiction reader but that her husband had loved history books and biographies.
“In his last years, though, he was in too much pain to concentrate on reading,” she told me. “He kept starting books but couldn’t finish them. When he died, he left a big stack of books by his bed, all with bookmarks. Some of those books he had barely started. Others he’d almost read to the end.” She paused and then continued, “After he died, I didn’t know what to do. But then I figured it out. I decided to finish those books for him. I’m reading them, one at a time, start to finish. He couldn’t, so I will.”
Just because he was gone, she told me, his reading didn’t need to go with him. She read those books because she loved him; she read because she still could; she read because it helped her remember him.
Book
s and people are bound together. I can’t think about certain books and not about certain people, some living and some dead. The joy I’ve had from these books and from these people, and all I’ve learned from them, merge into one stream in my mind.
We can’t do much for the people we’ve lost, but we can remember them and we can read for them: the books they loved, and books we think they might have chosen. Maybe the reading can help us answer the questions they would have asked us if they were still here to ask them. Maybe the reading can help us figure out how to honor their lives and continue their legacies. And maybe the reading itself can help us answer one of the biggest questions we can ask ourselves: Why are we here at all?
Every book we’ve read and everyone we’ve known, living and dead, is with us. We can call upon all of them. I was reminded of this when a friend told me I had to read a collection of poetry called What the Living Do. It’s an extraordinary cycle of poems, published in 1998, by the American poet Marie Howe, related to the illness and death of a younger brother from AIDS.
One of the poems is called “My Dead Friends.”
MY DEAD FRIENDS
I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were—