I know a woman whose son died by drowning on the night of his high school graduation. She told me she got through the weeks and months afterward by reading and rereading the works of Willa Cather. The calm and clarity of Cather's prose stabilized the woman and helped her through the time.
We have rafts that we cling to in bad weather -- consolations, little solidarities, numbers we dial, people we wake up in the middle of the night.
Somehow it is not much fun to wake up the television set. The medium is a microwave: it makes reality taste wrong. Television transforms the world into a bright dust of electrons, noisy and occasionally toxic. Turn on the set and lingering dreams float out to mingle with CNN. Dreams are not an electronic medium.
During the war in the gulf, the escapist magician made urgent reality inescapable. Television became spookier than usual in its metaphysical way: the instant global connection that is informative and hypnotic and jumpy all at once -- immediate and unreal. The sacramental anchormen dispensed their unctions and alarms. During the war, I found shelter in books in the middle of the night. They are cozier. The global electronic collective, the knife of the news, could wait until the sun came up. The mind prefers to be private in its sleepless stretches.
Read what? I am not talking exactly about reading to escape. Nor about reading to edify and impress oneself. Paradise Lost is not much help at 3 in the morning, except of course as a heavy sleeping potion. I mean the kind of reading one does to keep sane, to touch other intelligences, to absorb a little grace. In Vietnam the soldiers said, "He is a man you can walk down the road with." They meant, a man you can trust when the road is very / dangerous. Every reader knows there are certain books you can go down the road with.
Everyone has his or her own list -- each list no doubt is peculiar, idiosyncratic. The books you keep for the middle of the night serve a deeply personal purpose, one of companionship. Your connection with them is a mystery of affinities. Each mind has its night weather, its topographies. I like certain books about fly fishing, for example, especially Norman Maclean's brilliant A River Runs Through It, which, like fishing itself, sometimes makes sudden, taut connections to divinity.
One man rereads the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He cherishes their world, the fogs and bobbies, the rational wrapped in an ambient madness, the inexplicable each time yielding its secret in a concluding sunburst, a sharp clarity.
Television news, when it flies in raw and ragged, can be lacerating. The medium destroys sequence. Reading restores to the mind a stabilization of linear prose, a bit of the architecture of thought. First one sentence, then another, building paragraphs, whole pages, chapters, books, until eventually something like an attention span returns and perhaps a steadier regard for cause and effect. War (and television) shatters. Reading, thought reconstruct. The mind in reading is active, not passive-depressive.