Books unite us in uncertain future
As we close out the year, I can’t help but reflect on the strange times in which we live — and, sadly, I think we should prepare for stranger and perhaps scarier times ahead.
I genuinely fear for where we’re going to be collectively as a country a year from now. I wonder if I’m living through the end of a democratic republic that represents the will of the people in the United States. I worry that our planet won’t be able to sustain life as we know it today.
In this atmosphere, books are a balm — a means of escaping the anxiety of life — and a shield as they offer a method to gain deeper understanding so we can forge the best path forward. I do not know who I would be without reading. A love of books is one of the greatest gifts I received from my upbringing, and I cannot imagine a life separated from them.
That said, by far the coolest book-related thing to happen to me this year was winning Philip Roth’s old clock radio at auction. I’m looking at it as I type. I occasionally use it to listen to NPR. I haven’t even switched the time to correct for daylight savings, and yet, for some reason, I love having it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why owning an old clock radio that once sat in the house of a great writer pleases me so much, and I realize the pleasure is similar to what I feel when someone writes me for a recommendation.
It’s human connection over a shared interest, across a divide. I do not know and have never met the vast majority of my Biblioracle correspondents, and yet we have this thing in common. I think reading through the requests are my most hopeful moments in any given week. Just look at these people and all of those books they’ve read — and they’re coming to me for more. Amazing.
Amazing too are the notes I get from readers about a particular column, where they tell me whether they agree (or not).
We need to start a club for those of us who do not understand the genuflection over Malcolm Gladwell because we are more numerous than we seem to have known. When I wrote in an October column about how art still manages to bind us together, I heard from multiple people who said they felt the same way and even saw the Tribune’s Sunday Arts & Entertainment section as a beacon of light in a dark world.
Amazing.
After writing about my appreciation for the audacity of Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport,” a correspondent emailed in the style of the book: one long sentence of amazing verbosity coupled with grammatical integrity.
Amazing.
Even the reader who seemed to have dusted off a rarely used Twitter account to declare they were never going to read me again after I had expressed disapproval of President Donald Trump reminds me of the ways we are connected. That someone would go to the trouble of finding me online just to make sure I knew that they thought I was wrong … amazing.
I worry about our president, who seems to believe rending us apart is his most effective reelection strategy, but when my anxiety and fear ratchets up, I’m going to keep coming back to my Biblioracle inbox.
It reminds me what we share. John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”