This I Believe

I believe in the redemptory power of creativity. More specifically, I believe that beautiful, insightful, and powerful writing can save us or at the very least, make us better people. The first most significant fact in my development as a thoughtful person would be that I lived out in the Kentucky countryside, far from any signs of suburbia or gangs of children riding bikes together and roaming neighborhood streets. The second — as a child I lived in world of history and imagination, evolving from the mustard yellow bookcase that lined the upstairs hallway. The lower shelves all contained navy blue leather Britannica Encyclopedias with gold lettering, but it was the upper shelves, full of older books of literature and history that my parents had held onto from college that fascinated me and made a book lover out of me. There was my Dad’s Kentucky frontier history book with colorful images of Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone that inspired my brother and me to scout around the pine trees in the front yard as if we were on the lookout for various frontier pitfalls.

My mother’s old college literature books were much more daunting because there were no pictures at all, except for the occasional author’s portrait (usually a distinguished looking man with a formal name like Lord Byron). As a child I became acquainted with e.e. cummings, who looked very friendly to me because he didn’t capitalize anything, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Coney Island of the Mind was alluring because the cover was a picture of a blurred amusement park. Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein were entire novels I attempted to read because they seemed like cool adventure stories with fascinating covers of monsters and Lilliputians. Middlemarch, I thought, was a simple romance story by some English guy. (Who knew these same Norton Critical editions that looked so alluring to a child would come back to haunt me as a college English major?)

So, it’s been a lifelong love affair with books and writing. I believe that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne of Green Gables are partially responsible for the feminist I am today, and that without Anne Frank at age 12, I would never have been at all political or interested in human rights. Without Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, and Catharine Earnshaw, I probably wouldn’t have found all-consuming love, my own equivalent to Rochester, Darcy, and Heathcliff.

I believe that when I’m at my lowest, I have only to pick up a Rilke poem or an Emerson essay and I will find some measure of reassurance and guidance. Holden Caulfield’s disdain for “phoniness” and Mersault’s strength amidst an absurd world sometimes, admittedly, keep me sane. In fact, when I am tempted to shake my head in resignation and disgust at the world, I go back to a timeless and seemingly secret society of writers, poets, and essayists, from Aristotle to Atwood, and I marvel that I, indeed anyone who can read and think and perhaps has a library card, belong to this tradition of complex thinking. There is a utopia on my bookshelf to come home to and devour.

I believe, in a time when appearance and money seem to outweigh anything else, that knowledge, a sense of where we’ve come from, and a sense of what it means to be human from a plethora of perspectives are the most vital things we should strive for.