⚂ [ another test post ]
-Ira Glass'>
Sometimes when you read a book, nothing happens. That doesn't make it a bad book - on a scale of bad where bad is grocery store novels or airport buys - but it makes it unmemorable and in a lot of ways, that's worse. There are the bad books too, the ones that make it feel like clawing out every possible bastardization of words and plot conceivable to man, plus a few more - either by stringing together a story that makes me want to avert my eyes because of secondhand embarrassment or to simply throw the book against the wall, which usually I believe is unacceptable. But then there are the good books, the world-opening kind where you get this incomprehensibly physical feeling of being let in on something special but not singular, old and new. The ones I really love - it's so simple and predictable to say, but here it goes: they make me laugh and cry, make me feel in a lot of ways I don't think most other experiences manage for me. C.S. Lewis said that a children's story that's good only for children isn't a good story in the least - something like that - and I couldn't agree more. It's a matter of taste, true, but age? Good stories don't have expiration dates or must-be-this-tall(or short)-to-ride requirements. There shouldn't be some kind of lockout. Books are independently amazing because, when they're good, they invite you in and ask you to stay, and soon after or almost simultaneously they convince you that it's worth it to do so - to read until there isn't anything else left to read; and then when it's over you're lonely, uncertain because you have to leave and the world the book made is so much more familiar than anything outside of it.
I'm a consecrated believer that a type of magic does happen in our so-called real world, that other worlds exist even if we never have scientific proof and what's more if someone gave me scientific proof that they couldn't. In a way I would expect it and think: well of course your science tells me this, because it's true, for our world, that things like wishful thinking and carriages previously pumpkins just don't weigh in with the reality on this earth. That would make sense. To a degree, I'm sure it's a coping mechanism of some sort, not that I'm waiting to walk through a wardrobe made of apple-wood in my own time or to find suddenly that my ceiling is a floor. Only this: if I can believe in this kind of enchantment existing somewhere - that these stories I love and can't read without crying until I'm red and splotched to Olympic gold standards come from somewhere, then I don't need them to exist concretely here, even though here is where I am. Books like the Dalemark Quartet, when you're a kid, are 'impressive' and 'a little dark' and 'adventurous' to the adults around you, maybe. But when we get older they go from 'adventurous' to 'escapist', and this, this ranks up there with Things I Hate to Be Told Most (Predominantly Because I Think You're Wrong and We'll Just Have to Agree to Disagree). I can never find a way to compromise with these people who look down their noses and say I should read something worthwhile.
Well what's worthwhile?
I'm sure it's different for everyone, isn't it? Sometimes we meet like-minded sorts and gravitate, magnetize like we do, but more or less there are still varying degrees inside of those common lines. So when - because I'm 24, because I should be more academic or serious - I'm told 'That's nice but you should--' and other derivatives, I've learned not to argue. It's too much work and it's not that they don't agree so much as that they don't understand. Worthwhile? Serious? I'm very serious about the books that I love and if they happen to include talking beavers and knives that can be excalibured and flying castles, then that's that. I am frighteningly, very possibly embarrassingly serious about the stories that I love and I love them on every level that I think I could possibly invest my love in anything or anyone. They are common ground for myself and a handful of others - some here and some not - but even when they have universality ( when you know how to look ) I've always found them personal to the point where it hurts, leaves marks like scars or a hand holding on too tight, the way I leave them when I dog-ear pages or break the spines or underline my favorite parts - which of course means some of my books are ninety percent underlining and only ten percent anything else.
When I found out that Diana Wynne Jones died I just kind of sat here and clicked though tabs on my flatmate's computer and tried to understand what it meant because it's not like I ever met her or had any sort of direct communication.
Except, sitting here still, between then and now I realize, actually, I did. Everyone who has read one of her books and fallen in with it the way you fall in with a friend, a dear and old and I'm afraid to lose this friend? They have had communication. It's not the same as communicated, but it's still a message from one person getting to another, even without return service. The story is there, and we've taken the conscious effort to follow it through, once or more than once or more than a dozen, more than that. I don't have the right kinds of words for the books that people have had to replace for me because I read them so much that pages were falling out. I don't know how to say that I can fall in love with the potential for distinct let-down or redemption crafted in the shape of something that is published for children but utterly open to everyone. I don't know how to explain it, though obviously I've tried. There is a chopping order in grief - family, close friends, people who actually knew her as an individual and not solely through her writing and her speeches or interviews; they all get first pick and rightfully I think, despite what some people will say about that standard. I think we're somewhere in there too though, not at the top but not at the bottom either, because the truth is, from what I had been able to find of her just speaking, she was driven by the people who might read her stories second only to the kind of magic she infused them with, a magic that seemed to follow her. There's some overlap here, where it's a little like being weighted down for all the right reasons, because there's something that needs to be said and she was the kind of person who had the right words for the saying of whatever it ended up being. And then there's us, the people who grew up when we read her books, not because we were little at the time (I wasn't) but because that's the road running through all of her ideas, mapped out and put into bound form so we could take it with us in a crammed bus or train or under the great banyan in the school courtyard.
They're not make-believe the way a card-trick is just an illusion or anything like that. They're make-believe in the absolute cheesiest way imaginable, cheesiest and, I think, most truthful, because, while you're there, that's what they do; they make you believe. Stories you love are stars that can never die. I mostly guess that my faith in some incarnation of enchantment stems from a similar place or similar places as to where those stars make unimagined constellations, earths and skies that on this plane we can only reach with the right words.
I hope you're somewhere you love and are loved, Diana Wynne Jones. You more than deserve it. And thank you.