I could write an open letter about sexually transmitted diseases. Perhaps I could wax didactic about pot smoking. After all if you don't take Nancy Reagan's insipid advice and say "no," you could watch yourself, from outside your body, allowing the enticing and rewarding to just float away into oblivion while you rationalize your isolated and increasingly sedentary existence. That high deceived you. You did not prove string theory or find Amelia Earhart last night. It was just a video game and some Mountain Dew, and this morning your life has yet again not progressed.
I could do that, but I won't because I'm writing to you, Dear Student, about reading. What else? Contrary to my current job description, I am, and will forever be, a teacher of literature. Today I want to talk to you about how noble, and essential reading is. Before you crumple up this letter, metaphorically speaking, hear me out. Well, the hearing should be literal, the crumpling metaphorical. Come to think of it, you are not literally able to hear me, so that is also metaphorical. Most things are. But I digress. I do not mean the skill of reading. Today I do not care about guessing meaning from context or decoding words by their Greek and Roman roots. Let's be honest, even on my best day I don't care much about those things. What I care about is you, Dear Reader. I care about you, and because I do I have one request:
Find Your Writers.
You have already found your favorite movies, bands, snack foods, and youtube channels. Your generation is adept at generating playlists and Instagram likes. You know the exact filter you want to use on that picture of your Burrito Supreme so it looks kind of hipster, despite its corporate tool origins. I know you have opinions about all manner of things and a keen understanding of what you like and don't like. So, find the perfect filter, post it to your Snapchat story or your Tumblr and come with me to that last frontier for some of you--the bookshelf.
You must find your writers. The ones who speak to you. The ones you return to again and again. You will share her poems with your friends when they go through a bad break up. You will post colorful memes from a favorite chapter, and you will dream that someday you'll meet someone just like....
Some of you have already found your writers, so you have an image right now in your mind. Is it Augustus? Four? Katniss? Holden? Hermione? Romeo? It should NOT be Romeo, but more on that later. Many of you have not found your writers though, and it is to you I write. If you read enough, you will fall into the worlds created in fiction. You will begin to see more clearly the Victorian sitting room as it is described. You will taste the acrid smoke of the artillery fire, and when she brushes up against the sleeve of his wool coat as they share a cab, you will feel their chills. Literature transports us, and since unfortunately the Doctor may not be coming in his TARDIS to whisk you away through all of time and space, you should start seeking your own adventures.
While the feeling of being lifted from your world into other realms is wonderful, do not read only for sensory pleasure and escape. Reading can be a way to work through your fears, doubts, and insecurities. A fictionalized, yet nonetheless realistic other self can be your therapist. You cannot change your alcoholic father. Swallowing anger and sadness poisons only your own blood. However, find a novel that speaks in a voice like your own. If it is well-written, and so many of them are, it will help you. You will say, "Yeah, dammit, that's how I feel!" A cynical person may tell you this is not real solace because it's just a book; it isn't real. I submit to you that our understanding of what is real is decidedly and unimaginably limited. When Harry realizes that the Kings Cross station encounter is happening in his head, he worries it is somehow not real. Dumbledore reassures him:
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
Think about how much of your life every day is spent inside your head. While sitting in class, while watching that cute girl laugh with her friends, while listening to your mom lecture you about your grades--there is a running monologue in your head. Those thoughts aren't physically happening for all the world to see, but it doesn't make them less real to you. They are yours, intimately yours. Books can help you live the interior monologue of others, just as intimately as the voice in your own head because your reading voice is also in your own head. Unless you read everything out loud, which is just odd. You should probably see someone about that. Instead of therapy, or writing more bad confessional poetry in your diary, try a book. You will be pleasantly rewarded. Find a writer whose voice you like, a writer who shares your most intimate concerns. Then join that writer in a meditative conversation.
Over the next few blogs I will submit to you some of my writers. I do so in order to show you how and why writers come to be important to us. Sometimes it is just the way their words roll around deliciously in our heads as we read. At other times a book is yours because it came to you at a moment in your life when you needed it, and now it has become part of your heart and memory in a way that you are not willing to dismiss. These writers are not mine because they are great necessarily, although I will fight anyone who says otherwise. They are mine the way a particular stuffed animal was mine in my toddler bed. They are mine the way I like my coffee with sugar and cream so it looks like a paper bag and tastes like an autumn morning. They are mine the way my favorite jeans are mine. The works of my writers fit. They make me happy. I like holding them, drinking them in, and being inside them.
I have many practical things to teach you, Dear Student, but when you love someone you tell them the truth. The truth is I do not care if you remember the ending to Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace". Nor do I care if years from now you remember the number of lines in a sonnet or how many metric feet are in a line of iambic pentameter. I don't even care if you truly understand what the green light at the end of the dock represents. Okay, perhaps I care a little about that one, but I'm willing to let it go in favor of a larger, more essential truth. Reading enriches your life in ways incalculable, strange, and lasting. This does not happen magically, nor does it happen with every book. You must do the work. You must find your writers.
My first writer for next time will be John Green. If you have not already found him, I submit he could easily be one of your writers, too. Unlike so many grouchy grown-ups, Green loves the place in your life where you find yourself right now--adolescence. Until we meet again, I will sign off with a link to his Crash Course videos on The Great Gatsby because although I said I would let that green light go, I can't do it any more than Gatsby can. Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of your as-yet-undiscovered-writers. Besides, if you watch the videos now, you might begin to understand why John Green is one of my writers. More on Mr. Green later.
For now, Dear Student, farewell.