How Might Reading Be Healing?

First Thoughts

I received some nice responses to my questions last week about a healing library—all are appreciated.  One comment in particular seems to point to a next step: “Perhaps the question of how reading is healing might itself be the guide to sorting.”  It's a good idea I think--a place to start.

So----some first thoughts then on how reading might be healing.
Which have turned into a list:

15 Ways of Looking at Reading and Healing:

1. Reading as Entrance into a Healing Place
2. Reading as a Teacher—a source of information—the book itself, the process of reading as a teacher.
3. Reading as Company
4. Reading as Solace
5. Reading as Necessary Escape—or Respite—Reprieve
6. Reading as Discovery
7. Reading as a Form of Meditation—quieting the body and the mind—certain books and poems can do this I think—and it wouldn’t be the same of course for each person.
8. Reading as Food for the Imagination
9. Reading as a Source of Healing Images
10. Reading as a Source of Humor—and Joy
11. Reading as Connection
12. Reading as a Glimpse at a New Story—pointing to new possibilities—perhaps leading to reframing one’s own story
13. Reading as a Catalyst for Healing
14. Reading as a Catalyst for Writing
15. Reading as a Catalyst for a Healing Conversation
16. Reading as Restoring Harmony—as “an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself.”  What Plato said about the arts.  Quoted in that excellent article in The Guardian by Blake Morrison, The Reading Cure, which I wrote about briefly a few weeks back.

I’m now in the middle of reading Olive Kitteredge, a book of interconnected stories by Elizabeth Strout.  I chose her book out of the library because of a quote on the back cover by Richard Bausch, a fiction writer who was one of my teachers several years ago now.  He writes: “Elizabeth Strout restores my faith in the word, in the quality of fiction to shine light on even the dark and still make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.”

Make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.

Can reading do that?
Can it do that sometimes?

It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Strout’s book takes place on the coast of Maine.  Place is part of it.  But not all of it.  There’s also a skill, a nuance, an attention to the details and foibles of her characters—and a kindness.  Just a deep kindness and generosity toward her characters.

And now I realize—it doesn’t surprise me that Richard Bausch likes Elizabeth Strout as a writer.  I think he was the teacher who told us that you have to find a way to love your characters in order to write fiction.  You have to love your characters.

That’s what I feel when I sit down to read Olive Kittredge—that Ms. Strout loves this collection of characters she’s assembled in this small town on the Maine coast.  Not love in a cloying or sentimental way.  But in a clear-eyed way.  And she’s doing something very interesting in these stories with the connections and inter-connections between and among these characters.  And, because of a way that she writes, leaving some things out—gaps—spaces—and doing this so skillfully—I find myself at moments participating in her town as I read.  I find myself participating in this sense of connection.  All the time carried by her prose.

I wonder if this has something to do with what Plato called harmony.