From Jo Walton’s Among Others:

If you love books enough, books will love you back.

So I’m reading Jo Walton’s Among Others.  It’s a 2012 Hugo nominee, but it wasn’t yet when I picked it up by chance, and I’m ashamed to admit that I hadn’t read Walton before, so when I cracked the spine—oblivious to the nomination—I had the unexpected shock of discovery that I used to have a lot when I was kid, but that I don’t have so much anymore:  This is beautiful and true.  Keats’ pronouncement that beauty is truth, truth beauty, seems apropos, though I wonder if he meant or understood that true things are often ugly and painful and that they too are beautiful.

Jo Walton certainly understands it.  Her heroine, the fifteen-year-old Mor, has been crippled in the same event—still mysterious at this point—that killed her twin sister, she’s marooned at an exclusive girls school by an alcoholic father, and her mother may or may not be trying to murder her from afar—may or may not being the key word, for the book, as far as I’ve read (I’m three quarters of the way through) mostly bestrides a line of ambiguity that’s hard to march.  Mor may or may not be able to see fairies, she may or may not be doing magic, her three weird aunts may or may not be witches with malign intent:  or it could just be that the poor child’s head has been turned by trauma and pain and reading.

Yes, reading. Among Others is a book about, among many other things, the power of books—especially, though not exclusively, the fantasy and science fiction novels of the seventies and early eighties. For Mor, crippled and lonely and precocious, is also an omnivorous reader.  She doesn’t much care what she reads—she’s as likely to show up with a Piers Anthony book in hand as with a Samuel Delany novel—but she’s smart enough to understand that Anthony isn’t much good at all (“they are crap really,” she says) while Delany is better than good, and to distinguish the two Silverbergs:  the pulp hack and the genius who wrote Dying Inside and Nightwings.  Her favorite collection of stories is Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, so you can’t say she doesn’t have taste.

Fair warning:  part of my love for the novel may be rooted in my own bibliomanic nostalgia—I devoured Silverberg in both of his modes, and like Mor, I more than once found refuge in Middle Earth.  Yet I think it goes beyond that to a larger truth.  Books save lives.  Literally.  When I was Mor’s age—at almost exactly the same time Mor was Mor’s age, another reason, perhaps that the novel speaks so deeply to me—I was a bright, scrawny child with thick plastic-rimmed glasses and a fair case of acne, unliked by my peers and uncomfortable in my own skin.

I was also a bully magnet, and remained one throughout college, a perilous time when, if I wasn’t being beaten I was being intimidated by the prospect of a beating. These are painful times to recall, even now.  I can remember the humiliation of searching every day for someone to sit with at lunch and the sense of betrayal I felt when my best friend wouldn’t talk to me at school for fear of catching my social disease.  I can remember crouching in a circle of jeering teenagers as I tried to gather up my books, only to have them knocked from my arms again.  I am probably the only person on earth who can claim the distinction of being beaten in the halls of Princeton High School—once so badly that I required surgery to put my mouth back together—and in the streets of Oxford, on only my second night in the country no less.  “You’re in my town now,” said the cop who broke that one up, as though he’d had to pull me off the other guy instead of vice versa, and so went my anglophilia in the space of a single short sentence.  As for girls—well, forget that.

But I always had books.  I had the stacks of the Princeton City Library, where I usually ran—literally ran—the minute the last bell rang, and raided the stacks for Asimov and Anderson, Benford and Bradbury, Michael Bishop and Robert Heinlein.  (I learned that librarians could be bullies too when I was forced to read a passage aloud, while others waited behind me, before I was permitted to check out a book.)  I remember still the first shipment I received from the Science Fiction Book Club.  And how I used to wake up with anticipation on Saturday mornings when my sister, coming home from a date, would sometimes stop at the drug store to pick up the most recent Analog for me, where I might find a new novella by Gordon R. Dickson or Timothy Zahn.  The best Christmas present I ever received—second to the manual typewriter I got in seventh grade (I was the only boy in my typing class)—was a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I’ve subscribed on and off for most of the three decades since.

Books were a life-line for me, a place of refuge.  They empowered me in ways I could not otherwise be empowered, if only vicariously, through the exploits of Strider and Gandalf and a dozen others.  Mass-market paperbacks and cheap SFBC hardcovers lined the shelves of my bedroom—another refuge.  Today many of the same books line the shelves of the room where I write.  I became the sort of person—and still am—who buys the nice trade paperback re-releases of those old books today, and shelves them in the same room, because my old copies are too fragile to risk and who knows, the day may come when I want to re-read The Man in the High Castle.

Today, much has changed.  I’m not as scrawny.  I’ve gotten contacts.  The bullying is a thing of the past.  I have a lovely wife and a beautiful child.  But one thing hasn’t changed:  my love of the books of my youth, my love of the books yet to come, the way they provide refuge for me in moments of stress or sadness or loss.  I rarely watch television or movies these days —Game of Thrones is the only regular program I tune in to see and I hit the theaters only four or five times a year—but I never go anywhere without a book.  I’d like to thank Jo Walton for reminding me why.

“Daddy, will you lay down with me?”

This is a request I don’t often hear anymore—my daughter is 13, and set upon her teenage independence—so when it comes, it’s a pleasant reminder that I still have a role in, and some influence on, her life.  But it also draws upon emotional and intellectual resources I don’t necessarily have.  It’s easy enough when she’s seen a scary movie or heard a ghost story at school (Locker 17 is haunted!):  just wrap her in your arms until she falls asleep.

Last night was harder.  No sooner had I crawled in beside her than I realized that something larger was this time at work.  “I don’t want to fade away,” she told me through tears, and when I asked her what she meant, she said, “I don’t want to die.”  This was a poser.  My immediate impulse was to say, “Well, neither do I,” but upon a moment’s reflection, I realized that such a response would be less than helpful.

For the first time, my daughter had gotten a glimpse into the existential abyss.  I’m not sure why it happened when it did.  My parents (as I guess I’ve noted perhaps too often just recently—it’s much on my mind) are in the process of fading away, an apt phrase for people whose capacities are not cut off by some major medical cataclysm.  Rather they slip away, diminishing in almost imperceptible ways day by day.  The process has made me all too aware of my own mortality.  What I didn’t realize was that it had made my daughter all too aware of hers.

The question was how to comfort her in a situation where faith isn’t really an option—where my daughter, influenced by her family’s basic agnosticism, would be skeptical of any story about an afterlife?

I tried to argue that we are effectively immortal.  The brief span of our lives is all we know or can know.  Who can say?  The world as we know it essentially springs into existence with our awakening awareness; when that awareness fails, the world too is obliterated—the ultimate solipsistic understanding of reality.  But my daughter is too bright to fall for this (not so) clever bit of sophistry.

The whole experience reminded me of Whitman’s Song of Myself, wherein immortality—such as it is—is envisioned as a return to the regenerative process of nature.  Grass is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” he writes, and a little later “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.”  And toward the end of the poem he adds, even more directly, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

I’ve always found those lines to be powerfully comforting.  How beautiful to be reborn into the grass and the wind, into the very water that sustains us.  But to a thirteen-year-old worried about the survival of personality—the survival of the self—well, not so much.  In the end, late into the night, we fell asleep.  I held her for a long time, thinking about mortality–the terrible truth that someday we all fall into darkness, my parents, myself, even my daughter, so beautiful that it is sometimes all I can do to look at her.

“We all die and no one will ever remember us,” she told me, and I thought that these were questions that I had pondered all my life—and that the answers had eluded me.  Psalm 119 reads, in part, “My eyes fail with longing for Your word, / While I say, When will You comfort me?”  When indeed?

May/June 2012 F&SF

I have two new stories just out.

“Necrosis” appears in the May/June 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Without giving too much away, I’ll say that I was trying to write an old-fashioned club story and to experiment with the collective first-person point-of-view sometimes deployed by writers infinitely more accomplished than I am, Jeffrey Eugenides and Steven Millhauser among them, Pulitzer-winners both.  As Robert Browning puts it in “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / or what’s a heaven for?”

May 2012 Lightspeed Magazine

I’m not sure the club story has anything but antiquarian interest these days—do exclusive men’s clubs still exist outside of stories?—but it was fun to work in that mode, and imagine a world in which men of a certain well-to-do status and, yes, especially, smugness, encounter something which upsets the complacent order of their existence.  That certainly happens in “Necrosis,” though precisely how it occurs—and why—I will leave to your conjecture.

Meanwhile, “The Children of Hamelin” appears in the May issue of Lightspeed Magazine ( available at www.lightspeedmagazine.com ).  Again, I’ll forbear from getting into details, but it might be wise to bone up on the “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” before diving into this one.  If recollection serves me right, Browning took a stab at that old story as well.  I suspect—I’m certain actually—that his effort transcends my own paltry endeavor, but again, your reach should exceed your grasp, else why bother?

The present is but a palimpsest through which we read the past, lightly written.

I was reminded of this when my sisters called me home last weekend.  There was a crisis with my parents:  my father wasn’t eating, my mother suffering increased memory issues.  Fortunately the crisis proved exaggerated, more a matter of perception than reality.  Dad was eating less than he had in the past, but looked perfectly healthy; Mom’s short-term memory was shaky, but hardly debilitating.

Yet nonetheless, looking at them, I couldn’t help remembering the persons they had been:  my mother a commanding presence who finished her college degree working late into the night, took on a full-time job, and ran a household of six on the slimmest of financial margins; my father a profoundly introverted, dreamy intellectual, more concerned with the dating of Beowulf than with the daily run of existence.

And of course there were physical changes I had to contend with, as well:  the house where I spent my first eighteen years seemed smaller and less clean.  The grounds—all four acres of it—had formerly been immaculately groomed.  Today weeds and thorns, brambles and untrimmed saplings overrun all but the immediate yard.

Everywhere I looked I seemed to see double—the world that I had come home to, and, lightly written underneath, barely perceptible in the mind’s eye, the world I had left behind almost thirty years ago.  Maybe that’s as good a definition of ghostly as any other:  the inescapability of history, the past laying lightly its hand upon the present.

My parents are becoming ghosts.  They sleep away the afternoons; their lives as they had lived them once languish half-forgotten.  By the time I started home, I felt haunted by the experience—accompanied by the ghosts of lost time, by the past I had seen so lightly written under the present, by the inevitabilities of a future that would overwrite this moment as well.

As the miles unspooled behind me, I thought the feeling would fade.  But it only grew stronger as I drew close to home.  When my dog jumped up to greet me, I saw not only the dog before me, but the memory of the departed dog to come.  In my wife’s arms, I felt the future weighing heavily upon us.  And when I held my daughter once again, I clutched her hard against me, knowing that a time would come—and soon—when she too would return to a shrunken house inhabited by parents in a hundred tiny ways diminished.  With every passing moment, we are becoming the ghosts of our former selves.  And though my daughter does not know it yet, she too becomes every day the ghost of a future yet to come.