Lord of the Rings - a lifetime

Part One of possibly many

A few things first:

• Sign up for the Goodreads giveaway for Colony Collapse! The giveaway runs until the 21st!

• Speaking of which, Colony Collapse is out in two weeks!

• I’m giving away the ebook of Howl! The sequel is coming at the end of April with the third in the series coming end of May. So catch up now!

• I sure would appreciate if everyone reviewed Glossolalia and Howl!

• Oh, too, the audiobook for Sing, Behemoth, Sing is now out! Narrated by the incomparable Kelby Losack who also did the Glossolalia audiobook and will be doing the Howl and Iron Wolf audiobooks too.

• I have discussed serializing a novel here for a few months, ever since we did a poll, and that day approaches, though what I’m going to serialize has changed. I’ll explain later and also show people how to opt-in to those emails.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the right way to write this essay for several months but I’m not sure I can manage it in any kind of concise way and so rather than struggle to fit this into an essay or send one that would stretch the edges of reason, I’ve decided to serialize it a bit. So consider this the opening to something longer that will come along in fits and spurts as I attempt to reckon my own life with a few books that have maybe been too large in my life.

the version I grew up with

Many of my early memories of my mother include her on the couch reading books while I lived my little child life nearby. In the home they’ve lived in for 25 years, books line two walls on separate floors. Thousands of books packed tightly into these massive bookcases.

I remember running my hands along their edges before and after I learned to read. I took some out just to stare at the covers. I was especially enamored of the covers showing Lucifer, the devil, enemy of god and mankind. I’d take out these books and stare at them. Some of them were full of paintings showing angels and demons, saints and their god, sinners and their tormentor.

All these thousands of books looming over me probably destined me to be someone who has spent his life inside of books, though the same is not true of my siblings. But I have spent my entire life in the middle of a book. I cannot remember the last time I wasn’t reading a book and I wonder sometimes if reading is more a compulsion than a habit. Some need in me to always have a book to read rather than some desire to actually read the books I’m always reading.

I’ve even come to the somewhat terrifying notion that I may have already read all the books I will love. While I doubt this is true, I find myself struggling more and more to find books that reach deep inside me, that remind me of all that I have loved, of all that I once hoped for.

I have read thousands of books. I have no idea how many because I can barely remember a single book I read between the ages of 5 and 15. I can barely even summon up their covers or plots.

There are exceptions, of course, and The Lord of the Rings is a big one.

I remember the sound of my own heart opening wider. The susurration of pages turning.

I remember the texture of my dreams as thin paperback pages.

And I remember the sound of my mother’s voice on the phone talking to someone I could not see or hear.

Talking or reading. That was how I thought of my mother when I was a child. When I close my eyes, I can hear the rich depth of her voice. It is a sound I’ve known since before I was born and it is a sound of comfort, of peace.

All those thousands of books my mother owns—I have read almost none of them. The vast majority of these books are religious. Of the many shelves packed full of books, there are probably fewer than ten novels.

But I have heard her talk about them. Have heard her talk to me about them, trying to instill god inside my chest. Trying to light a spark inside me that would turn me forever towards god’s light. She wanted me to know the voice of god and the sound of heaven.

I know the sound of my shattering instead.

Thousands of religious books. Theology, the history of the Catholic Church, biographies of saints, biographies of the Devil whose covers called to me, and then strange rightwing conspiratorial biographies of Chairman Mao and Hilary Clinton and so on. People who have become monsters to a certain kind of person.

My older brother taught me to read when I was five. Or at least that’s how I remember it, but I remember it in fragments and my own memory is, as I’ve said before, spotty. But I do remember sitting with my brother on our couch holding Fox in Socks while he helped me along.

I have no other memories of learning to read or being taught to read. I don’t know what to make of this hole in me, but it has made this fragment of a moment grow to monumental proportions. And so when I went to school, I already knew how to read. Was already reading little biographies of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle that people make for new readers.

An up all night kid living an up all night life. Even so young, I was awake late into the nights. I would sneak downstairs after my parents went to sleep and run my hands over the spines of books that I could now read.

How I longed to know what was inside. How I had so little interest in these books of saints and sinners.

I remember reading The Wind in the Willows and feeling as if my chest opened up wider and wider. This yawning sensation at the edge of my jaw, as if it needed to dislodge in order to gorge all these words, this glorious world.

All these beautiful words. All this wondrous, impossible beauty.

A howling longing.

But for what?

I didn’t know. Didn’t have the language or experience for it, but if I may attempt an answer now, here, off the cuff, as it were:

My own life seemed so small and ephemeral that I wanted the wide open and seemingly solid worlds tucked between covers.

I needed the solidity of language (someone insert a poststructuralist joke here).

They may be but leaves of grass, but they meant everything to me.

A promise. A grand vision. An impossible invitation to invent a world and a life inside and outside of it.

But I didn’t know how to find the books I wanted. How to find those worlds I needed. Those stories that could take me far away and fill me with light, with hope, with the overwhelming power of terror and tenderness.

I wanted to know the sound of my body filling with beauty.

My mom didn’t take us to the library or to the bookstore to pick out whatever we wanted, and even if she had, I know that I would not have picked up the books I truly wanted.

I remember the sound of shame.

The susurration of a door sliding open and a priest beginning his blessing while I muttered forgive me, father, for I have sinned. A priest at a pulpit intoning, in Latin, the torturous death of god who loves us eternally.

I don’t know when I first became ashamed of the things I like. I don’t know if I even had to learn this or if it’s something that’s true for many people no matter what.

The fear of letting someone else inside ourselves. The terror of revealing our naked selves to some outside observer.

It is something I still feel.

It is the sound of my mouth closed, listening for approaching footsteps.

An answer has begun to blossom in me, however. It’s come through watching my own son develop his own taste for books, for movies and music, for dance and games and the stories I tell him before bed.

When he shows interest in something, I show interest in it too. When he stops to share bits of his life with me, I stop alongside and listen. My fumbling attempts to make him know that I am also invested in Bluey or the Little Blue Truck or Luigi.

Such a simple thing. It is so little. It takes no effort or time at all.

So simple, yet possibly one of the most important tasks I have as a father.

There are holes in my memory. Some of them because I have forgotten but some because the moment never existed.

I do not remember my parents showing interest in my interests. I do not remember telling them about Power Rangers or dragons or asking them about the devil on those book covers or any other number of things.

I remember my mom reading books of theology on the couch or talking on the phone. I remember my dad’s interest when we showed interest in baseball, in cowboys, in knights.

But all this howling need in me turned inward. At some point, I began to believe that I could not share the worlds or words inside me with them or with anyone else and so I never asked my mom for those books with monsters on the cover or for more stories like The Wind in the Willows, and so I gobbled up The Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children because those felt safer, more acceptable, more innocuous than the things I really wanted, and so I would not need to witness their indifference or even their confusion or the slight revulsion I assumed would be there.

But after years of reading, of tracing my hand over book covers to books I didn’t want to read, I finally asked my mom for a book that I didn’t know the name of because there was no name, to me, for what I wanted. I simply wanted something to blow the top of my head clean off. I wanted something that would expand my chest, that would break my heart, that would fashion new eyes out of the ones in my skull.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings set pictured at the top of this essay are the first books I remember my mother giving me. She told me that she had loved these books when she was younger.

And I stop here, now, typing this because even such a simple memory brings tears to my eyes. I did not know, even now, 25 years later, how much looking back on this moment would mean to me.

She gave me something that she had once loved.

I had spent my short life going to church with my parents. I had stopped believing in god a few years before this moment, but I went to church with them anyway. Never told them that I could not believe in god, and not for lack of trying.

I simply could not.

And so when I got my first communion, I felt like a liar. And I felt like a liar every Sunday when I went to church and took the sacrament on my tongue, when I went and confessed my sins to a priest who I didn’t believe in, but never once did I tell the priest of my accidental, uncontrollable apostasy.

You see, I was a liar. I had to become one.

I cultivated secrecy and I lied every day of my life about the things I liked and wanted for fear that the person on the otherside of this telling would look at me in a way that would break my heart, that would make me ashamed.

But the moment my mother gave me these books—this was the sacrament I’d spent my life waiting for. I cannot tell you how happy I was in that moment. I cannot explain to you what it meant to me then or even, looking back, what it means to me now, except that I feel my chest caving in and my breath coming short and my hands shaking over this clicking keyboard while tears keep rolling down my cheeks.

This very private moment that has meant so much to me, that I had buried inside myself. Remembering it now is like picking at an open wound.

I read The Hobbit quickly. I read it in my bed, on the toilet, and on the short walks in between the two. I did little else while I journeyed with Bilbo from The Shire to the Lonely Mountain and back again.

But when I tried to speak with my mom about this book, about the tremendous gift she’d just given me, she seemed distracted and bored.

I went to her, to that voice cellular deep in me, hoping to hear the sound of her own body filling with beauty along with me own.

But I know the sound of my shattering.

It began here.

I do not know—cannot know—if anything in my life would have been different had she responded differently, had she smiled and remembered with my telling of the first time she stepped into Middle Earth and told me of the joy and beauty she’d found there.

And so I buried myself deeper beneath my skin.

Thus and so, I became a liar.

I kept my heart a secret.

I wanted only to never hear my shattering again.