The Pleasures of the Just-Right Book

Before I read the last few pages of Rebecca Mead's book,  I want to share with you what just lifted me up off the bed where I was reading and took me back to the red-dirt, piney-woods, sweet-tea land of my childhood.

"Our earlier experiences provide the ground upon which our characters are built...and some part of our character grows from the brilliant, scintillating, intense capacity for emotion that a child experiences.  There is nothing particularly special about the landscape of our youth...except for the important fact that it is where we learned to be human." 

Reading a hard-bound book with deckle-edged pages and a beautiful cover, the pages thick for underlining, written by a writer who blends scholarly and personal reflections, reminds me of the pleasure I felt when I first began to own hard-bound books and learned that I could scribble and underline in them with impunity.

The real pleasure, though, comes when what the writer is saying feels so true and rightly said that I want to linger in her paragraph for a long time, like lingering in an actual place.  My scribbles and lines are little flags I post there so I can return later.  On pages 251-253, Mead writes about the power of childhood landscapes to shape who we are. What we consider beautiful, what we try to replicate, what we like and dislike--the roots of our preferences and aversions spring from places outsiders would consider most ordinary.

After the following passage, I just wrote a great big green "Wow!"

Eliot's books show me that "the remembrance of a childhood landscape is not mere nostalgia for what is lost and beyond my reach. It does not consist of a longing to be back there in the present; or a longing to be a child once more; or of wishing the world would not change. Rather, it is an opportunity to be in touch again with the intensity and imaginations of beginnings. It is a discovery, later in life, of what remains with me. "

At least one other writer has said that the material of most writers comes from their first decade and a half of life.  Maybe it's in returning to the "intensity and imaginations" of our beginnings that our unique and individual Muses are most vibrant and alive. Maybe we travel and make art and write to see the world again as a child, everything new.