One Thousand Splendid Lives

On C-SPAN 2 the other night, writer and radio talk show host Garrison Keillor was speaking at the American Library Association Conference. He made the point that we read in order to have more lives than one. I could not agree with him more. I am sure in my lifetime I have lived at least a thousand splendid lives (though some were not so splendid) as I have identified with the complex literary characters who were protagonists of fiction.

As a young girl who was fascinated by biographies, I was Marie Curie working in the laboratory diligently with her husband Pierre to discover polonium and radium. I was Abraham Lincoln who struggled with the issues of keeping the union together and the possibility of freeing the slaves. I was Lou Gehrig as he uttered his famous words in Yankee Stadium, "I am the luckiest man alive" after disclosing his battle with ALS.

As a young woman, I centered my reading on Gothic literature by Victoria Holt or perhaps Charlotte Bronte. I was always the woman running along the cliffs of the English countryside being pursued by the man who might be either my murderer or my hero. Thankfully, it was always the latter in these formula pieces.

As I became an English major in college, my reading shifted to the heavy, complex pieces with far more complicated heroines. My favorites were Anna Karenina who threw herself onto a railroad track because of her affairs and Madam Bovary who could never get out of debt and who also chose suicide as an escape.

My latest identification with a literary character is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This fiction piece won a Pulitzer Prize this last spring. I cannot say that I enjoyed the struggle of a father and son in a post nuclear world who were doing their best to survive as two of the good people left on earth. I can say that the novel was so well written as to be spellbinding. It is precisely this identification with characters that compels us to imagine our own actions in such a world. Would we kill to protect ourselves and our food, or would we acquiesce to circumstances and simply give up?

It is these and other questions that keep us reading and essentially living one thousand splendid lives and counting.