Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: The Stories That Predict Us, by Matthew Cheney

There's a line in one of my favorite books, TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE, by Bohumil Hrabal -- or maybe it was Henry Miller, or Cervantes, or a zen parable about an illiterate nun... -- about how books are burned in vain, that any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. It's like a finger pointing to the moon, and you don't need to follow that finger to see the moon. A telescope would be nice, though.

Maybe this is what Matthew Cheney was talking about, when it comes to the effects of a story on our lives. TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is about a bibliophile whose job was bailing books (for recycling the paper), and I saved it from the discard pile while working as a page in a library. I filled a dumpster with paperbacks and old Polish books that had been moldering in the basement, because the librarians told me too, but I brought home a box of Dumas novels from 1905, a Rudyard Kipling book from the 1920s with a swastika on the spine, and all kinds of books that would have otherwise been thrown away or sold for pennies. Hrabal's novel hit me so hard, maybe, not just because it is a powerful and beautiful book, but because I had read it at the right time, when I could identify with its narrator/author, the bailer of books.

Kerouac had a similar effect, once upon a time, but I can't get into his books anymore. I once spent the night in a run-down YMCA, in a room once inhabited by a racist with hypergraphia and paranoia, and he had written on the walls. The words themselves were legible, but they made no sense.

I'd disagree with Cheney in the sense that, well, I don't exactly know where ideas come from, or what can influence my decisions and change my life. In some cases, I may never have seen the moon without someone pointing it out, but if I wasn't ready -- if I didn't care, at the time -- I may have ignored that finger altogether, or it could have been a cloudy night. Who knows? All I know for sure is that I enjoy reading, and what I read seems to enrich my life somehow or another. Words are so much fertilizer.

--José