I remember once hearing a doctor say that the strongest natural drive is thirst. Our need for water (or it’s 1st cousin diet coke) is stronger than our need for food or sleep or sex or comfort. Water covers the earth; We drill into lands to find it fresh. It grows crops that are harvested into raw food, and water feeds animals that are harvested into delicious chickfila. Water is our most basic unit of physical nourishment that keeps our bodies running.
Our non-physical self needs water too, and closest thing we have is language. Words feed us in very basic ways: We get thirsty-lonely and thirsty-confused and thirsty-in love and these things are quenched with water-words. Letters, the most basic building-block of communication, are little droplets that collect into tall glasses full of words and wash ourselves clean in bathtubs of books. The right words can irrigate the mind for a harvest or wrong words, or no words, can bring about the dust bowl of depression and the terrible drought of loneliness.
Human body is ¾ water, I was sure that most of mine came through memoirs or fiction. X-ray would show lines from Virginia Woolf and JD Salinger mixed in with my blood. For that reason, I don’t part with my DNA easily and don’t give my books away easily either (and frankly I encourage you to look twice at being close friends with someone who does). I just let them pile up around my room and lay sideways on the top of the bookshelf and masquerade as decoration on my desk. This might look like I’m messy (which I absolutely am) but the truth this particular choice is quite intentional. I would love for you to walk in my room and say, wow, you have a lot of books. I would feel like a proud mama fussing over her babies or a peacock trying to hide all his feathers. Also, I figure this is basically the same as feng-shui because I’m putting flowing water in my space to listen to it quietly babble.
Reading is a solitary activity which never posed a problem because I never felt alone. When all the words from all the other places became bone dry to me again, I would wade into the river of books. I had learned very early how how to make my way the river, dive down deep and float at the top. The river is generous and wide, and, in bookriver, the water rests on the soft silt of truth rather than the hard dirt of fact. I remember laying in my bed in my freshman year in college reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I went to MTSU in a freedom march away from Knoxville. Rather than the brilliantly successful experience I had hoped, I was actually miserably lonely and felt in stuck in Murfreesboro: “where dreams go to die”. I had exactly one friend who was a grad student I met in the writing center. I tried to stave off my ever-increasingly neediness and desperation but she was gracious and very nice and talked to me about books when we got coffee occasionally. She casually suggested one day that I might like this book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. At the time, this book played formative role in making me feel less crazy and less alone.
On the other hand, the only problem with all that is that I did not ever feel alone. This was as much of blessing as it was a curse- The deeper I was, the more peopled and connected I felt. In fact, I often felt so much less alone in that pages than in the pews or the in streets or in the classrooms. I read She’s Come Undone when I was junior in high school and I could have sworn to you that I knew Dolores and Wally Lamb must know me. I was witness to rich lives in print, pages and pages of qualification to end up at a novel’s last line that gave me chills. There were such beautiful things in the binding, until I realized that people on the shore were out of the water and their lives had more actual people that pages.
In his beautiful, beautiful author’s note to his book Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller writes,
No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath: I’ll tell you how the sun rose/ A ribbon at a time…
I found this to be true in an annoying and inconvenient kind of way. This meant I had to return to dry land, soaked with the thick, sour smell of the river. There would be humans there. Off the page, humans wear flesh and not standard type of black ink. Something about flesh fills humans full with really annoying things like questions and feelings. They are given to phrases such as “bless their hearts”. They get together in big groups and do things like create elaborate network of reality television and elect George Bush (twice). There is no narrator that gives me back story or explains people’s thoughts to help me love them. Shore-people have bodies and having a body is just the worst. I once read that bodies are just soul containers, and I’ve always loved that description. The book that is inside of me is so different than the soul container looking back at me in the mirror. I really don’t know exactly what my inside story would look like on the outside, but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t 5’2”, lumps in some places that should be smooth, skin sensitive to hot and cold and pimples on my face. In that sense, even the sounds of my own body were lost in the water which was great because my own body was something I was always trying to get away from.
Maybe a part of the draw of the bookriver is the underlying belief that if I stave off the actual people for long enough, I might not ever have to come back to shore. But I inevitably do go back and inevitably love some of them anyway and have to deal with my own human fleshiness. The truth is that the pages are so much safer than the people and this fact has not failed to complicate my life. This off-the-page business is clearly flawed. So when I have free time, I always go back to the river. I cannot emphasize it’s generosity enough: It wash over me again and again with warmth like home- something familiar and forgiving.
