Caffeinated Politics

During my medical physical this week, I was given a series of questions about whether I was feeling moody, depressed, a lack of interest in eating, an inability to sleep, or thoughts of self-harm. While I feel for people who have those concerns, I fall far on the other side of the equation. The varying shades of green in the spring leaves, a newly discovered authentic Chinese restaurant on State Street, and the unexpected find of a new author, to name three things that have floated my boat this week alone, underscore the simple joys in life that truly make me happy. Apart from my teenage years, which were horrifically awful due to bullying from your typical low-IQ brutes who grew up on farms, I have never experienced the doldrums.

Some days, however, when the world feels a little too sharp around the edges, I reach for a book and a cup of strong coffee. There’s just something about settling in with a good story that smooths out the rough spots in a person’s spirit. I am reading the biography of Henry Ward Beecher and (on page 268) love his quote about books. “Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore! As a hungry man eats first and pays afterward, so the book-buyer purchases, and then works on the debts afterward.” Debby Applegate writes that in one five-month period in 1854, Beecher bought sixty-five books totaling $905.63. James and I cannot compete.

This week I’ve been thinking about how two books—The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution ride side by side.

Recently, a friend gave away a couple of Kindles following the passing of her brother. The one I have, my first digital reader, btw, contains over 1,000 books of international drama and mysteries galore. Many authors I love and new ones to explore. Such as C.J. Sansom. I was curious about who he was and discovered that The Shardlake series is a historical mystery journey set in 16th-century Tudor England. With a few critically acclaimed reviews, I launched into the first, Dissolution.

The Pillars of the Earth is all about building a cathedral, stone by stone, dream by dream. I recall reading the opening chapters the day James and I returned from a many-day stay in Galena, Illinois. I know it was October 7, 2017, because that is when an EF-0 tornado touched down on Madison’s east side, traveling along East Washington Avenue. I was not so far away, serenely reading my book. I would become mesmerized by the Cathedral series.

Now I am engaged with Dissolution, which takes me inside a monastery at the moment the Catholic Church is being uprooted in England by King Henry VIII. The Follett book is about raising something toward the heavens, the other about watching something sacred to many crumble. But the funny thing is, they both pull me into the same quiet places of my mind. Each book reminds me that people, no matter the century, are always trying to make sense of their lives, trying to build something anew, trying to hold something together, trying to understand why things fall apart.

Loving history, I can say equally of both books that they are written with the desired effect of the reader feeling the weight of history pressing down and lifting up at the same time. And that’s the magic of books, as they take a reader somewhere else, but they also bring you back to yourself. If that makes sense.

In my teenage years, when I needed books more than anything, I discovered they loosened the knots in my chest. I found that books could lift me up enough to see daylight again. For me, in rural Hancock, books allowed me to know the world is bigger than whatever storm was waged against me. In the darkest hours of my life, following the suicide of my best friend, Mornings on Horseback, a powerfully uplifting biography about the young adult years of Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough, kept me going. Then and now, books remind us that people have been struggling, building, breaking, loving, losing, and starting over long before you or I showed up. There’s comfort in that. A kind of quiet companionship. A powerful tonic for the soul.

So, I keep reading. Cathedrals, monasteries, mysteries, history, whatever calls out from the shelf. And now I’m using the Kindle. (And I swore many years ago I would never succumb to a digital reader.) Because every time I open a book, I feel better connected to the larger world.