The Finest Magic You Can Feed Your Mind

The Christmas that I turned 10, I was given a bit of pure magic.

I can still remember the hush that fell over the usual Christmas morning proceedings, a chaos of torn wrapping paper, six eager children, dogs, cookie crumbs and grandparents.

It was a box, I could feel that much, beneath the paper.  As I peeled it away, an embossed crimson spine came into view, fitted perfectly into a handsome gray box.  My parents had given me a boxed edition of Little Women.

Not only was it a story I adored, and knew almost as well as my street address.  But the book itself brought into the room such a quality of elegance, and elevation, it took my breath away.  It was an object that fully rose to the occasion of its content – its imaginative and emotional reach, its gravitas and its bottled fire of independence, ambition, and character that lured me from the staid suburban streets of my childhood into a vastly larger and – possible – state of being.

I was blessed beyond words that I was born into a family of readers, weekly library frequenters, and omnivores of summer reading lists.  To this day, I can see my 8-year-old self thrusting parries with my friends on the school playground over who had solved the current Nancy Drew mystery.

The giving of books as gifts continued in my life through college days and beyond.  I still love to give books (and in fact have several early acquisitions for this year’s holiday giving).  Books still pile hopelessly on every work surface and coffee table in my home.

It is no secret that book sales and the practice of silent reading has declined in the past 25 years – a decline accelerating with each passing season.  Our iphones, our screens, the isolation of COVID, have all hooked us into addictive, interruptive behaviors that cut into our capacities for sustained concentration.  My students have become skimmers, intolerant of long assignments.  Most of the young people I know read on Kindle, able to be interrupted with each ping of a notification.

Brain researchers are discovering, however, that books not only entertain and inform.  Reading words on a page activate more centers of the brain than almost any other activity we engage in.  Books grow our brains, keep us mentally astute, and help to maintain working memory.

Books have been friends, advisors, illuminators of paths I’d never have uncovered by my own lights.  I don’t think it could have been other than that my own life would be in service to the healing, teaching, consoling power of words.

Another’s words, wisdom, humor, warmth break the stranglehold of our smaller, less noble, meaner concerns.  Good books pull us up to the peaks of Narnia and down to the lowest levels of Dante’s Inferno.

Books have the upper hand when it comes to enlargement of being, of empathy, and of understanding.  I can be nudged to consider fascinating morsels on Instagram, or the daily news.  But only in books can I find the sustained magic of entire worlds bristling with the concentrated vitality and passion and vision that allows my soul to spread its wings.

 

Suggestion #1 for you, dear readers: 

Find a book you once loved, and determine to reread it – even if it takes you longer than you expect.  Notice how it calms you down, satisfies as scrolling doesn’t

Suggestion #2:

 Borrow one of these from your neighborhood library.

All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley (memoir)

Fresh Water for Flowers, Valerie Perrin (novel)

Foster, Claire Keegan (short story)

For the Common Good:

1. Please nominate in the Comments a book that you’d suggest others read…

2. Or…share with us your all-time favorite poem…(yes, it can be a love poem)

We will all be the richer for this!