Why We Love Certain Books

You're turning the pages and a very strange and very nice thing dawns on you.

This book gets you.

Obviously the author, who might have died centuries back,

never knew you at all.

But they write as if they did

It's as if you'd confessed your secrets to them

and then they'd gone of and written this work around what you told them.

Transformed of course into a story about people with different names,

or into a essay that doesn't cite your case explicitly.

But might as well do, because it's so completely on target.

We never quite feel we are understood well enough.

Even by the people who we genuinely like and who are emotionally attached to us.

A permafrost of loneliness often persists just below the surface.

Even when things are broadly speaking going well enough.

All this, the book that understands you, appears to know and to be able to correct.

The book in question might be one that speaks to millions, like the Harry Potter series.

Or it could be an almost unique discovery of your own.

Perhaps Schiller's 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind'

Written at the very end of the eighteenth century

With it's haunting efforts to fuse a noble idealism with political realism

It could be a self-help book about sex

but alights on just the things that are troubling you

Or you might feel that 'Mademoiselle de Maupin'

Written by Théophile Gautier in the middle of the 19th century

And which tells the story of a man and a woman

who are both in love with a central character.

the operasinger Madeline de Maupin

Was written by historical miracle exactly for you

A book knows you by pinpointing

And taking very seriously, a major but often ignored problem

that happens to be looming in your existence.

For instance, when Harry Potter is with the Dursleys

the feeling of being an alien

in a familiar environment

For long stretches of time Harry has to live around people

who have no idea of his real nature

They never acknowledge his actual strengths

He's regarded as a contemptible freak

for things that elsewhere would make him popular and important.

The book is hugely alive to the feeling of not being appreciated.

With many books we're pleased because we encounter sympathy for things that deserve generous treatment

but normally don't get it.

The darker aspects of one's character are getting a tender hearing.

You've been heard, you've heard others

And the book says - I know

So often despite all the people around us

We're lonely and ashamed

We're haunted by the worry that no reasonable person

could feel anything but derision or contempt for our problems.

We feel that to share them with our friends

would lead to bewildered rejection.

A book that understands you is like an ideal parent or friend,

who makes it acceptable to suffer in the way we do.

Our weirdest sorrows or enjoyments

are recast as valid parts of human experience

which can be met with sympathy and kindness.

It is, even though the relationship is with paper and ink only, a kind of love.

And perhaps one of the deepest kinds of love we'll ever know.