(If I seemed like my soul was sucked dry in my five years of all-white, all-upper-middle-class, all-Mormon, all-Republican, all-college-student life at BYU.... It was. Very, very much.)
I love to read a great book and get a chance to step into someone else's mind and heart. To empathize with a person's feelings, choices, experiences.... It's a sacred experience to me, truly!
But I also love those moments when a great writer captures, with better words than I ever could find, a feeling I've lived with in my life. I love when a great writer pulls something from deep within my heart, and makes it tangible through words. I love to get wrapped up in the thought he's trying to convey, with each phrase feeling like, yes, he's describing this better and better! I feel this! I know this!
It's so nice in those moments to feel...understood.... It's nice to feel like someone, sometime, empathized with me. And it's nice to be able to use the author's words in my own sooooo-INFJ quest to understand myself.
I just read a fabulous little book by John Steinbeck called The Red Pony. It's an atypical coming-of-age story, beautifully written, with compelling characters. I loved it.
I didn't personally relate to these characters all that much, which made it even more of a wham-moment when he finished a chapter with words I'd searched for so many times in my life. The feeling he described even occurred as the boy sat and contemplated and admired nature, which is exactly when I have always felt this exact thing. I loved how he wrote this:
"Jody walked through the vegetable patch, toward the brush line. He looked searchingly at the towering mountains—ridge after ridge after ridge until at last there was the ocean. Jody thought of [some stuff... :)]. And he thought of the great mountains. A longing caressed him, and it was so sharp that he wanted to cry to get it out of his breast. He lay down in the green grass near the round tub at the brush line. He covered his eyes with his crossed arms and lay there a long time, and he was full of a nameless sorrow."
That's me! It's me. To be alone in nature, thinking.... Caressed by a longing so sharp you want to cry just to relieve it. But cry for what? It's a nameless longing. A nameless sorrow.
Sometimes I feel like maybe it's a moment of feeling like I'm in the wrong place, so far away from a heavenly home.... Perhaps a moment of feeling beautifully close to the Lord and needing Him so much closer. I don't really know. But I've felt it in peaceful moments throughout my life.... I've even sat by myself covering my eyes with crossed arms, as Steinbeck described, listening to a river flow, or waves crash, just soaking in the feeling.
Now I see I must not be the only one.... :-) What a nice moment; to find this in this little gem of a book. I love great writing.
P.S. This was my first Steinbeck novel since I was a kid. Oh, he's so good. His writing is so uniquely simple, but not a single word is wasted. So easy to read, yet so very meaningful. I'm a fan. :-)
3 comments:
Thank you for sharing! I do love a good book recommendation!
If you haven't read Steinbeck since you were younger, you MUST read East of Eden. I KNOW you would love it. And if you read it when you were younger, you will love it even more now. (There is one part in particular with a bunch of old, wise Chinese men searching for just the right translation for one word in the Old Testament that particularly brings you to my mind.)
Which reminds me that I read "The Last Battle" after you recommended it in your Favorite Books post. (It was the only one that I already had at home.) Excellent, excellent, excellent beyond words. Brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing!
So glad you enjoyed "The Last Battle!" This makes me happy. :-) Such a great, great book! Must be shared. :-)
Ok, I absolutely must read "East of Eden." Matt read it a few years ago (had only read it before as a youngin', I think), and was absolutely floored as well. Came away saying it was one of the best books he'd ever read! (I think he's calling it his favorite by an American author. :)) I'm feeling inspired at the moment to go do what I keep saying I'll do, and finally get a copy of this book. Thanks for the recommendation! :-)
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