Irrigating the Desert

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

~ C. S. Lewis

I am going to make a confession, and it is going to sound very silly, but here you are:

I have cried myself to sleep before because I was so sad that the characters in The Lord of the Rings were imaginary and not real.

Now, at this point you may back away from your computer slowly and never visit this site again. You have my full permission. (Waits for the people obeying her to finish doing so.)

Okay. Now, for the rest of you. I'm sure you're still here because you believe somewhere deep inside of you that I'm not an absolute freak beyond all human possibility.

(Everyone else nods slowly.)

You in the back there. Are you sure?

(Person in back glances around himself, and then gives a jerky, hesitant nod.)

Ahh, excellent, so we're all on the same page. On to the serious stuff.

I have a friend who doesn't understand why I love reading so much. She thinks books are good things, but when I exclaimed that I couldn't understand how anyone could go their entire life without having read a book, she gave me one of those "Are you sure your head's on quite straight?" looks that I'm so used to getting. This was because she was one of those people whom C. S. Lewis's quote applies to, those who think that literature only describes reality.

In reality (ha, ha, ha), literature does much more than that. The ex-quotation-mark narrative of a story isn't the real point of the story: it serves as a vessel to present us much more important ideas than "Then so-and-so ran sideways" or "The sky was very green that day". (Personally I doubt that either of those sentences do a great job of describing reality themselves, but you'll have to forgive them, they're trying their hardest.) The narrative and the descriptive words and the entire framework of the story is like the handshake and the common friend's saying "So-and-So, this is Such-and-Such; Such-and-Such, this is So-and-So." Its purpose is to introduce the reader to characters.

I am, of course, talking about fiction, not non-fiction. It would be very educational to pick out the character that a philosophy book or a political treatise was pointing to (although ultimately and ex-textually, they are all pointing to Jesus and the Father), but fiction actually has characters in its narrative, which is what I'm referring to. The author does his very best to take the reader deep into the mind and heart of the character he's writing about. And if the reader gives the writer full command and lets the writer take her wherever he wishes, she will begin to become familiar with the character, with its quirks and flaws, its habits and motives, its humor and physical appearance. By the time the book is over, a faithful and true reader will have subconsciously allowed herself to make friends with this character, although the character's side of the friendship is, admittedly, invariably frozen on paper.

Now, please don't think I mean this so seriously that I actually believe there is a literal friendship going on. Not at all. (The guy in the back lets out a relieved sigh.) But that's the way it feels to the reader while she's engrossed in whatever book she's reading. Outside of the book, she knows quite sensibly that the characters are all made up and don't really exist...but the magic of a book is that, once inside it, she's not so sure anymore.

And so when the world is getting her down and people are sounding like idiots, she may retreat to a book, often one she's read before, and come back to the characters she knows and loves, the gentle, flowing style of the author she's come to trust, the plot that she already knows completely but isn't tired of hearing more than once. This is a very introverted, nerdish thing to do, but that's okay (assuming you don't make this your only source of comfort in life), because, as we all know, nerds = cool + awesome + smart + the Next Big Thing (just wait! Just wait, I tell you! Ten years, just ten years!).

But one day she may realize with a start that eventually those characters are going to fade away. She'll realize how much she admires these people she's read about and how so much she'd love to meet them. I hope you know what I mean. Every once in a while I get a dreadful longing to meet Peter, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie, and I have to really bang my head on something hard before I can get it to go away. Meh. (Shudders.) But I think the reason for this happening to nerds is that we can sometimes look for so much satisfaction in relationships with books...and then suddenly we realize that we're not going to get it.

There is only one book that can fully irrigate the deserts that our lives have become. And it says that whoever reads it will be like a tree planted by streams of water whose leaves do not wither.

C. S. Lewis, I would say, was right on target.

~Yfalle Eruvyweth