Are there any therapies that prescribe reading physical books as a cure for loneliness and isolation?
My favorite excerpts from the article:
I have a friend who is much more comfortable with the thought of dying than I am. A few years older, he cares for the elderly, stands watch with them, then ushers them through that eerie portal. He told me recently that death will be a buoyant moment because “all your spiritual guides will be there to welcome you into their company.”
“I know so,” he said, nodding, smiling and saying yes, even when I asked about a writer or two I knew only through books I had read.“You really think so?” I asked, incredulous.
The thought that Steinbeck and Merton, Kazantzakis, Twain and Flannery O’Connor would greet me in the Great Beyond made that dreaded moment — and the unnerving strangeness of eternity — a bit more palatable. It was comforting to think that those whom I had read as pilots and pathfinders to help me navigate the human condition would be on hand as personal escorts into the afterlife. Rascally adventure guides.....
I had a recent conversation with a retiring law professor who was not only moving out of his office but also leaving his home for an apartment in a retirement community. What bothered him most was boxing his books, putting them away. “They are my friends, part of my personality,” he said, looking at the floor, paused in thought.
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I have a good many friends of all ages who happily embrace buying and reading books on screen: convenient, adaptable, easy on the eyes, such ready access to a universe of texts. I also have a friend who says it is like watching your children out the window; she misses the touching, the holding, the heft, the personal intimacy of a book in her hands. I like the weight and feel, the tactile quality of books. They fit right and good in my hands, both paperback and hardcover. Size and shape and thickness matter. Whether Moby-Dick or the slender reeds of Thích Nhất Hạnh, to carry a book is to walk with a gift box full of river stones and gems. Its tangible, meaty presence gives it character, and long-familiar page designs and type fonts — with underlines and scribbles — welcome me home. I think it significant, not sad, that books draw their lifeblood from trees. And when you lift a book from the nightstand or slip it from a shelf, it opens itself like a doorway, vaulting the imagination into other places, away from yourself and the tedium of days — quietly — and away from the ubiquitous screens, pop-up distractions and info-chatter of our existence.
I have also known comfort and pleasure from the books standing unopened on my shelves. I know them by their spines. Some I returned to often, pulling them down for work, as references and sources, or to revisit for simple reading pleasure. Some I have hardly opened, but discarding them seems an insult to those who gave them to me. I know what was poured into each one, why someone said, “You should read this.” A good many are by writers I have known — perhaps not household names or major leaguers but fine, insightful, dedicated writers whose work deserves respect, even admiration, and a place in my collection. Some of them offer inspiration, motivation for the indolent writer in me; they all, collectively, speak of the literary life, the value and nobility of the written word, the human quest to speak and share, to connect, and announce that Kilroy was here, and had something to say, wanted to leave a mark, did not go without first singing out the window.
And my being physically situated in their midst, flanked by such evidence, such testimony, elevated the labor of my little days. I had a book or two of mine on the shelves as well, a small but earnest voice in the chorus.
Almost every book has two stories to tell — the one found on its pages and another that’s largely secret between me and it. And that relationship has its own significance. I read The Magus and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth when traveling in the Canadian High Arctic, and happened upon A Prayer for Owen Meany when looking for rhyming lines in crazy life. I read A Gathering of Old Men because of an African-American friend who grew up on the other side of the levee from me in Louisiana, and Giovanni’s Room because a gay friend once wanted me to know what he was going through. I read Lonesome Dove at the persistent urging of an older friend with whom I backpacked in the West each year for a decade. Its themes of honor and male friendship guide me still, as Parkinson’s disease has slowed the steps of my gentle hiking partner.
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The books that have surrounded me all these years have also kept me in close proximity to myself, reminded me who I am and where I come from. There’s much value in that — to listen to The Little Prince again just when you’re feeling trapped by adult “matters of consequence,” or to recall Siddartha when consumed by the world’s phantom lures. I need not reread the books to hear their meanings and messages. I know them by what they instilled in me long ago, by resonant feelings, truths imparted, keen, insightful perceptions bestowed. A glance at each title evoked intangible realities that asked only for imagination, memory and faith to be rekindled.
A scan of their spines reminded me of the enduring truths that writers go after, the goods to hold fast to. A good, good book carries the writer’s vision and presence and spirit. It is a holy conveyance from one to another, and it bears more than pages and print. There is not just writing between the lines; I am touched — sometimes deeply — by the power of language arranged just so. In a book you carry that around with you like a treasure box, bearing the virtues and hauntings the author sought to approximate.
So I cannot help but think of these books as not only companions and friends but also as religious objects, holy relics that have acquired some ineffable quality — a presence, a character, a soul — because of what we have had together, what’s been shared, the interchange that has taken place between us. I do believe in the spirits of inanimate objects and how things may take on a life of their own. I know that is an old-school thought, perhaps more elementary than that — like some primitive superstition, a belief in numina, totems, blessings and grace and pieces of God invisible to the eye. I also think that, like other mysteries, faith is required for it to be true.
I do not know if others someday will feel similarly about books stored and hidden in digital devices, words and paragraphs scrolling across backlit screens. But I do know my life has been diminished, has become poorer since those many books got boxed and stacked away in my basement at home. My friends are gone, their spirits absent; I miss the daily communion. My glass and metal work station feels two-dimensional, bright and barren. I miss the wood grain and friendly clutter, the old chairs and the fierce reality of books staring me in the face.
I do not know if poets and scribes await me on the other side, or if there is another side. But I like to picture it. And I hold to the élan vital found in books as a happy clue to the divinity of things and an arrow pointing toward an afterlife — with Stegner, Styron and twinkling Sam Clemens grinning back at me.
Illustration by Kyle Stecker
