A Love Affair

I love literature so intensely that taking time to read can feel akin to engaging in an illicit affair. I sneak around at night, cover my tracks and falsify receipts from Barnes and Noble. I confess to having numerous affairs over the years: John Steinbeck, Leif Enger, Wallace Stegner, as well as a few less memorable dalliances.

One relationship has been particularly hot and cold. When I first picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible,” I must not have been in the mood and put it down after 30 pages. Two years later, I flirted with her again and found her deeply alluring. As I turned the pages, I laughed and cried, thoroughly lost in her world. Her memoir “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” was also compelling, though by that time our relationship had matured a bit, and I found parts of her world a touch less attractive. I’ve not yet read “Flight Behavior,” but am not getting great reviews from friends who have.

Like any intense relationship, a few snapshots remain fixed in my memory. I’ll never forget her ruminations over the loss of a baby to tragedy:

“Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.”

Her insight into incident is superseded only by her understanding of life’s longer arc. Again, in Poisonwood Bible she writes,

“Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”

Even though I love Barbara Kingsolver, I can’t imagine living with her over the long haul. Therefore, I’ve chosen just one picture of her to keep in my office. I lay it inconspicuously by my computer so others won’t notice, but it captures just the right balance of gravity, simplicity and insight:

“Here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides. I can’t tell you how good it feels.”