I like reading books for many reasons.
One is because I love the feeling of accomplishment after finishing a book, particularly a long one. As a mom, much of what I do is instantly undone. I wash dishes and they are dirtied. I make a meal and it is eaten. I change a diaper and… well you know what happens.
I also love to read because I love words. Some people can stand in front of a painting and get lost in its beauty. Some people relish in nature and find comfort and inspiration in it. (I just find bug bites and allergens.) But I find my beauty in words. I love playing words over and over in my mind. I love the sound of them. I love the elegance of carefully crafted phrases. I can stay lost in them, and when I am, I usually like being lost.
And I love to read books because I find communion in them. To me, the most meaningful art is art that tells us something universal about the human experience. I recently read Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It is about a lonely barber in a dying farming community. I’m a suburban woman who couldn’t cut a lock or grow a cactus in a desert, and yet I found myself in that book. I found some of my deepest longings and some of my most piercing wounds laid out for me to see from a different perspective. And because of that, I found that I wasn’t alone. I found that much of the human experience is universal, and I found that we can find communion and fellowship in the most unlikely of places.
I love reading for all of those reasons. But the reason I have been reading lately is for comfort. My life hasn’t been particularly hard lately. It’s been one of those in between times – in between the worst and the best. And yet I’ve found myself just tired and wanting to seek rest and solace and comfort. My word of the year this year was leisure, and I have been taking it seriously this summer. I have been trying to allow myself (truly allow myself without any guilt) time to rest between the busy seasons of the school year.
And when I’m looking for comfort and solace and rest, I always turn to the Ingalls family.
I recently picked up Caroline by Sarah Miller. It is a telling of the tales in the book from Ma’s perspective. I started reading it yesterday, and I can’t put it down. I find myself wanting to escape every moment I have to read it, and it’s not because of the plot. It’s because of the home I find in it. I find the same reprieve in Little Town on the Prairie which I’m reading to my oldest three girls.
I think that’s what those books do best. They describe the feeling of home that I want to create for my girls. Perhaps the Ingalls were ahead of their time with their constant creation of hygge. Perhaps things weren’t as comfortable as they felt – perhaps that was all because the stories are largely told from the perspective of a little girl who was kept warm and loved and fed during the most difficult of times.
I don’t really know.
But what I do know is that even when they are starving and cut off from provisions during what seemed like an endless winter, they still found comfort in each other, and in their woolens, and in the warmth they were able to create.
And maybe that’s what life is about. Maybe the life we are all meant to live inside is one where we find that reprieve at the end of the day. Maybe it’s a life where we go out and provide for our families and try to make the world better, and then we go home and feed our souls in whatever ways that is – whether it’s in writing stories or knitting socks or playing the fiddle.
Maybe that’s part of what we as a culture are missing today. We prize our down time, but too often our down time isn’t a time of leisure but rather a time of mindless escape that leaves our souls aching and withered rather than strengthened and restored.
And that brings us back to the universality of art. Those old books, the ones that have stood the test of time, did so because they are about more than the individual experiences of created characters. They are about more than plot and setting and character. And they do more than just keep us entertained.
They help us live more deeply and love more deeply and be more deeply.
They help us become more human.