The Silken Tent My Letter to the World October 1999

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 the Human soul
                    --Emily Dickinson
                       J1263

It was a plain black cloth-bound book, its title and author stamped in gold on the spine: "Madeleine L'Engle -- A Ring of Endless Light." Lynn had removed its colorful dust jacket -- she says it made the book slip through her hands and distracted her while she read. She was almost finished -- the little flag of her bookmark indicated she had only about 50 of the tale's 325 pages left to go.

Her paper for eighth grade honors English is due October 29th, and I wanted to read at least a substantial portion of the book before she began her written work. I took it with me to the bedroom and laid it on the bureau while I folded laundry and tucked the clean items away in their proper places. At the last I stripped the bed and redid it with clean sheets still warm from the dryer. I smoothed the coverlet, fluffed the comforter, and plumped the pillows.

A soft autumn light was filtering into the bedroom. I'd worked all morning with furniture polish and fresh linens, and the space looked so inviting that I decided to take my reward there. I took the book from the bureau, adjusted the pillows, scrunched myself up against them, and opened the cover.

I saw him for the first time at the funeral, I read, and I was pulled in. No longer was I in my bedroom in central Pennsylvania on a sunny but crisp autumn afternoon. Instead I was standing at a gravesite in a seaside community among members of the Austin family, a set of invented characters from the mind of Madeleine L'Engle, a beloved writer of young adult fiction. I was about to become a sixteen-year-old girl on the cusp of her young womanhood, struggling with a grandfather's impending death, a friend's betrayal, the push and pull of the longing for independence and the comfort of dependence -- all the issues of self and soul that mark childhood's end, and beyond.

In The Reading Life Revisited I spoke of the "magical interaction between text and reader" that is the stuff of time spent with books. Emily Dickinson cut to the heart of this when she described books as frigates that take us lands away. The late poet John Ciardi said the same thing when he spoke at my college more than thirty years ago. Whenever he wanted to spend a few evenings on a whaling ship, said this urbane academic, he pulled Moby Dick down off the shelf and took off again on a voyage at once familiar and fantastic.

Call me Ishmael -- possibly the most famous first line in all of American literature. It joins other famous first lines in a litany that takes me back through a list of books I have loved, that have taken me to more lands than I can ever visit, that have transported me backward and forward to times that can never be mine --

Arma virumque cano -- first line of The Aeneid, which I read in Virgil's Latin and in C. Day-Lewis' elegant English translation as a senior in high school --

If you really want to know about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. -- Holden Caulfield would be nearly seventy now, if he were real and if you figure his dates from 1945, his earliest appearance in print. I met him when I was the age he is portrayed in The Catcher in the Rye, and, because of recent discussions with some literature teachers, I need to refresh our acquaintance --

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. -- I read parts of Little Women by the feeble glow of the bathroom night light, sitting on the edge of the tub, having crept into my grandmother's bedroom to retrieve my glasses, which she always cleaned for me before she went to sleep. The strong willed, outspoken writer and reader Jo remains one of my most beloved alter egos. --

High up on the long hill they called the Saddle Rock, behind the ranch and the county road, the boy sat his horse, facing east, his eyes dazzled by the rising sun. -- My horse period ran from about third grade through seventh or eighth (and came back some twenty years later, when I actually took horseback riding lessons). My Friend Flicka is the first in a trilogy whose other two elements stand beside it on a bookshelf downstairs, but which I have not yet read. So many books, so little time.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .  My copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man dates from my junior year in college, a giveaway from the instructor who introduced me to "The Silken Tent" (remembered with sardonic fondness in these pages), his last name on the flyleaf in the bold strokes of the Flair pens he favored. It's the Joyce to wet your feet with, he told us, before you can even begin to think about Ulysses. Twenty-five years later, when I pressed my feet into the marks left by generations of scholars on the stone steps of the building where Joyce attended classes, I remembered Albert's words.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. So begins Harper Lee's evocative but problematic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Portrait, Catcher, and Moby Dick, I have in my hand the original volume I acquired when I first came to love the book, so that to hold it is to hold a piece of the girl I was in 1963.

And that is part of what books do for us -- they take us on journeys we never could have had otherwise, and they help us remember who we were when we embarked. My daughter, the heretofore indifferent reader, liked A Ring of Endless Light so much she asked me to recommend some other titles she might use to begin "reading for pleasure" some more. And she wrote her name on the flyleaf in a neat upright black line from the Pentel Microfine Superballs that dot the writing surfaces of this house. It's the book she'll write about forty years from now. At least I hope so.