World’s Waiting
Open a book and you can step into another world. Watch a documentary and you can step into someone else’s shoes.
Stories have the ability to transport us. They act on our senses, causing our mouths to water when we read Jhumpa Lahiri’s description of an Indian wedding feast (coriander and turmeric swirling saffron yellow through our noses), or making our hands clammy when we ever-so-slowly approach the years-locked door of the abandoned house at the end of the crooked street in Christian Moerk’s tale of an Irish love-crime. Stories act on our brains, firing mirror-neurons that make us experience the same emotions as the characters we read about or watch, bringing a tear to our eye when Romain Duris’s character realizes his pain over his sister’s death in Dans Paris, or conjuring peals of laughter when Will Ferrell’s character is accidentally shot with a tranquilizer gun and stumbles around a kid’s birthday party.
This power of story exerts itself over us whether it be fiction or non, bringing us literally – in our brain’s reality – into the point of view of their setting and characters, including their emotions and conflicts, and (very importantly) the character’s search for resolution to these conflicts. As such they are powerful conveyers of culture, ideas, perspectives, universal truths, and disputed notions. And they are powerful means of ‘testing actions’ – experiencing in the play ground of our imagination various challenges-responses-resolves before we hit the real game field.
Each Shabbat I spend part of my time reading something that inspires me. Much of what I pick up comes from the recommendations of others. So I’ve decided to start a Monday Book Nook to note my recommendation from the weekend, and where others can list theirs. It will be our virtual lending library, and with it I hope to build a plump card-catalogue of books we can all be touched by.
This weekend’s read is particularly interesting in light of the upcoming Purim holiday – a perfect time to launch a Monday Book Nook. Purim is a night and day of wearing a mask – not to hide, but to bring the hidden forward into the light. By stepping into the perspective of another, hidden aspects of ourselves, and truths we stepped over, become revealed. So, too, in my recommendation: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. In the book, Kingsolver puts us into a world that pits two opposing groups of people into their obvious conflicts, and then in a skillful series of fencing moves twists and turns and flips and hangs upside down all of the obvious until we are left with the hidden… and left to question our own rigid ideas about what is Left and what is Right, what is Science and what is Survival, what is Mystical and what is Common, and wonder about the place where all of this dissolves.
And now … what are your recommends?
