‘To do something very splendid’: On the Power of Useless Old Stories

“Jo’s ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no idea, as yet, but left it for time to tell her; and, meanwhile, found her greatest affliction in the fact that she couldn’t read, run, and ride as much as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic.”

– Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women”

I’ve always been a reader. The story of my life has, in many ways, been the story of the books that have made and shaped me, the books that have inspired me and taught me how to dream, that have opened me up to new worlds – and opened new worlds up to me.

I’ve always loved stories of faraway places and magical lands, of heroes and quests and the adventurers who would set off into the unknown to see what was out there, and to experience it for themselves. And I’ve loved stories of homecoming, too, when, returning from some odyssey or another, our hero must learn to see home in a new light, to reclaim it once again as his or her own. These stories have informed my worldview. They’ve taught me about the beauty – and the sadness – of life. They’ve taught me about good, and about evil, too, and about how they clash, in turn, for dominance over the human heart.

I was one of those kids who would stay up reading by flashlight under the covers, who had to be told to cut it out and go to bed – right now! Sometimes I did, but I can remember, on many occasions, staying up through the night to finish a book, only to stumble, tired and immensely satisfied, through the following day, my own vision transformed by the power of a good story.

The books I read growing up impacted and formed my vision of the world, and they helped me decipher the complexities of life and love, of creativity and wisdom, and of longing. They taught me about friendship, and about solitude. They taught me about fortitude, and how to see the world with fresh eyes – to go deeper into reality, and to look beyond the everyday.

Together with music, books were one of my most important windows on the world, and they meant the world to me.

Like Jo in “Little Women,” I still long “to do something very splendid” with my life, although, like her, I’m often not quite sure what exactly it may be. And my life, like hers, can often seem to be “a series of ups and downs … both comic and pathetic.” Sometimes what we feel most assuredly is the deep, deep calling, and a beautiful but poignant sense of restlessness – a yearning that tells us there’s more out there than whatever we have chosen to settle for – that the world is wider and wilder and more wondrous by far that we usually allow ourselves to imagine on a typical Tuesday afternoon.

I always sensed that books contained important clues to living a good life. But somewhere along the way, as I entered adulthood, I started to “put aside childish things” and began to feel like I needed to focus all my precious attention (and my all-too-limited reading time) on useful books, practical books, books that I imagined would grant me the most real-world knowledge in the shortest amount of time, offering an immediate return on my investment.

Self-help and other practical non-fiction can offer the promise of a shortcut to wisdom – a less-circuitous path to get us to the knowledge and know-how we seek. And at their best, they can offer us marvelous distillations of information along with genuine insight into the world we live in. But at their worst, they can become like bad versions of Cliffs Notes, or the literary equivalent of junk food – too easily processed to do our souls any real and lasting good. When this happens, they become cheap substitutes for the wisdom woven throughout the old fairy tales and bedtime stories and the novels that used to keep me up reading through the night.

At the end of the day, I still suspect it’s the stories, not the self-help books, that will really show us the way and lead us onward along the truest pathways and songlines. It’s the stories that will awaken the deep places inside us that resonate, in turn, with the deep places of the earth, from which we all come, and to which we all – sooner or later – must return.

Know-how is useful. It has its place. But it might be that we best know the world, and ourselves, through stories and tales, rather than through instruction and analysis. We are storytelling animals, after all, and sometimes the surest method we have to “fight the good fight” – both in the wider world and in our own lives – is through the telling of tales, or by becoming once more like little children, under the blanket, flashlight in hand, while all the stories of all the worlds unfold on the page before our eyes.

 

Photo Credit: Lacie Slezak on Unsplash