Love of Reading and Writing: Sibling Assignment #21

My friend and regular kelloggbloggin' reader Jane King wrote me an email not long ago. She told me that she had also been reading my sisters' blogs (links to come) and wondered how the three of us had all come to love reading and writing so much. Her question creates the framework for sibling assignment #21. You can find Silver Valley girl's response here and InlandEmpireGirl's here.

I first learned that a book could make me cry when I read Where the Red Fern Grows in the fifth grade (the impact was diminished some when I got kicked out of class while giving my book report to the whole class...Mrs. Denlinger didn't approve of my description of a scene when a bubble of blood comes out of a character's mouth).

I first learned how books could transport me to another world when Miss Kero read us both The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time in the sixth grade.

But I didn't really do much about these experiences. Through junior high and high school, I was much more interested in playing basketball and baseball and being active in other activities. I read school assignments and read sports magazines and books, but that all changed at North Idaho College.

During the second semester of my freshman year, I began to experience something I never had before. The poems we read were putting thoughts and insights I had had into words. I'd never known that others saw the world in ways similar to my own. I'd thought I was alone.

Suddenly the wall of isolation broke.

T.S. Eliot was the first. When I read the opening of his poem "The Hollow Men", I couldn't believe that someone else had thought or wondered if this is what people were:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with
straw

It might seem like an immature-freshman-boy-from-Kellogg-discovers-existentialistism
moment, but those four lines have fueled my reading ever since.

What is a human being? Are we hollow? Stuffed with straw? Or is there more? If there is more, what is it? Is it up to me to fill the hollowness with more than straw? Where's God in all this?

My desire to explore these questions has never been satisfied. It's what led me to read and study the theater of the absurd; it's what led me to read more poetry and to find I needed the poet Richard Hugo.

It was these questions that led me to see that Shakespeare was not an antiquated writer of popular plays, but that this very question regarding the nature of human life and what gives life meaning is at the heart of this plays. I have never discovered a writer better than Shakespeare in exploring these questions, so I devoted my life to studying and teaching Shakespeare.

I also discovered that the Christian faith is more than obeying rules regarding behavior. When I began, at Whitworth College, to discover that the Bible wrestles with these very questions of life's meaning and the nature of human nature, I became ingnited with enthusiasm about the Bible and living a Christian life. I even discovered that biblical characters had times when they wondered if humans were hollow men, empty, and had to work out those questions.

Seeing passages expressing uncertainty and raising questions about existence in the Bible drew me to a faith I had always thought was a faith of certainty.

So I read more. I read stories, poems, plays, theology, philosophy, works from religions around the world, history and other books and articles that helped me wrestle with the fundamental questions of meaning in human life.

This reading led me to become a spiritual and intellectual wrestler. I dove deep. The deeper I dove the more questions I had. I read more.

For years, I rarely read for entertainment or escape, except when I read Sports Illustrate or another book in my futile attempts to learn to play golf.

My wrestling nature fueled my graduate studies. I never read anything in graduate school just to get it out of the way or to jump through a hoop. I read everything in my serious pursuit to learn more about the meaning of life.

My graduate studies in Literature and Composition could be seen as secular seminary studies. I was very serious and demanded way too much of myself.

I demanded so much that I found writing very difficult because I could never write to the level of insight that I thought a piece of writing ought to express. In my dissertation work, which I failed to complete, the way I researched was so intense that I didn't know how to forge it into words, let alone chapters, or a book.

My seriousness in reading stifled my writing.

Once I quit graduate school, I couldn't write. I read. But I couldn't write.

Then I had a breakthrough. One day I visited a Yahoo chat room called "Professors Chat". I began to engage people in conversations about Shakespeare and other matters. I did join in some of the silly talk, but I really tried to write serious insights about things and when people came looking for help with papers, I wrote out help for them.

My writer's block ended. Writing fast in the chat room loosened me up. I was invited to give sermons at church. I wrote a couple of lectures for a lecture series I had put together. I published some articles. I published three poems. I found reasons to write and it kept getting better.

Then I started this blog and began to write something every day, even if only Three Beautiful Things. Writing has become a habit and I've relaxed about being profound, as if there is such a thing.

That's my story, Jane. It all goes back to T.S. Eliot and four lines of poetry and my introduction to Shakespeare.

It all goes back to trying to figure things out.

Credits: The artwork is "The Hollow Men" by sanithna phansavanh. To see the pieces as they appear online, go here.

Post Script: Soon after I was introduced to "The Hollow Men", I suffered a serious industrial accident which left me blind for five days. This accident fueled much of my passion for reading and trying to figure things out. I wrote about it and the impact in had on my search for meaning in a seven part series in this blog.

If you'd like to read my series "On My Blindness", you'll find Part 1 here, 2 here, 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, 6 here, and 7 here.