THE ISOLATION JOURNALS - DAY 18 - A TRUE FRIEND AND A GOOD WRITER

Today’s prompt:
Make a short list of texts from your past, even better if you can select particular passages or moments that meant something to you. Without necessarily revisiting the book (you can do that later), start writing about your relationship to it, in narrative terms. When did you read it? What was your life at the time? Write a scene of your reading it, replete with all the ways it made you feel. Then, consider why you needed it at that particular time. Follow it from there—feeling free to depart from the text.

If I were to make such a list for my last book, Abandon Me, I would choose (I did choose): The Story of Ferdinand, the films Labyrinth and Heavenly Creatures, The Chronicles of Narnia, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and Rilke’s Book of Hours.

Most recently I did this with Jack London’s White Fang, and the scene I used ended up getting cut from the essay, which is a thirty-page ode to my hands. You really never know what is going to find its way to the surface if you create an opening. 

A True Friend and a Good Writer

Charlotte’s Web is my favorite book. It was my favorite book from the first time I read it in second grade – or, rather, the time it was read to me by my teacher Mrs. Whitelaw at Heritage Heights Elementary School in North Tonawanda, New York. After Mrs. Whitelaw read the last page and closed the book, I went to the school library to check it out so I could read it myself. I’ve read the book countless times since then.

If you’re like me, the first line of a book is an indicator of whether it’s worth buying, reading, investing your time. It has to hook you right away. Here are the first few lines of Charlotte’s Web:

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. “Out to the hoghouse,” replied Mrs. Arable. “Some pigs were born last night.”

Ax. Morning. Baby pigs. Could the stakes be any higher?

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic, had an alternative theory about books: read page 69. If you like it, then chances are you'll like the rest of the book too.

Mothers for miles around worried about Zuckerman’s swing. They feared some child would fall off. But no child ever did. Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

As a child, I read those words literally. Swing. Falling. Holding on. But as I grew older, the words took on new meaning. Oh, the things I held onto so tightly for so many years. Happy memories. Hurt feelings. Faith.

For me, though, the true test of a book is the last page and especially the last line. As an author myself, I can’t imagine ending a book on a careless note. Probably the most famous last line, and justifiably so, is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Another classic last line — and a favorite of my brother’s — is from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:

Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

My personal favorite last lines, like their more famous cousins, all evoke a kind of bittersweet melancholy:

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing. (A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner)

She waited until they were all in their usual places, and then she asked, “Did I choose you, or did you choose me?” And The Souls answered: “Yes!” (E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday)

To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn’t…there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were – if there ever were – Princes of Maine, Kings of New England. (John Irving, The Cider House Rules)

I always go into a state of mourning at the end of a good book. I grieve the loss of friends whom I’ve grown to love over the course of a few hundred pages. Even if I were to go back to page one and start all over again, nothing compares to the first time you make – and then lose – a friend.

Charlotte’s Web has two sets of last lines. The first is at the end of the penultimate chapter, titled “Last Day,” and is almost unbearably sad:

She never moved again….Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

I remember reading that line aloud to my two sons when they were young, shortly after I finished chemo. I started sobbing uncontrollably. Tidal waves of tears. My sons looked quizzically at me and then at one another. “Are you OK, Mommy?” my older son asked. I had to laugh in spite of myself.

The last lines of the final chapter are more hopeful. They sound almost like a eulogy – the honoring of a friend lost but remembered. Or perhaps they’re an admonition to lead a better life.

Either way, to me, they are perfect:

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.