Back in May, Susan and I took the train from Seattle to Iowa, her new home. En route, I read Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers and later wrote the following reflection.
Somewhere in eastern Montana I finish reading Gaudy Night. With a sigh I close the book and stare out the train window, watching green and gold fields roll away from the tracks in undulating waves clear to the horizon. My eyes smart, and something in my chest aches.
The curve of the sky above the train and the fields seems taller than it does in Seattle, bluer, more three-dimensional. The clouds puff their tops into the dome of the sky, like snow-white pastries rising in a celestial oven. Holding the closed book between my two hands, I say in a jagged whisper that sounds loud in the silence of my sleeper car, “That book was so good I want to cry.” It’s partly that the book is over, and I’ve lived with these characters for almost 500 pages and come to love them, and I want to keep on living with them and loving them.
But it’s also something more. I watch the fields roll by. Small hills appear in the distance, dark blue against the brighter sky. I ponder the ache in my breast. To some extent, I know, it is envy. I will never, ever write a book like Gaudy Night, no matter how great a writer I become. I used to despair over this, feeling somehow shortchanged because my literary abilities are not on a level with Dorothy Sayers or Elizabeth Goudge or Jane Austen or George Eliot. I open Gaudy Night again, and find the page I want, where Harriet Vane says:
“I’m sure one should do one’s own job, however trivial, and not persuade one’s self to do somebody else’s job, however noble.”
She is exactly right, and I am less Salieri about the whole thing than I used to be. I can say with conviction that God gave me my gifts for a reason. I can even say, without rancor, that that reason is clearly not to become a literary superstar. And most of the time I don’t want to be a superstar. I just want to write better than I do, and that is entirely within my power.
The hills in the distance draw nearer, revealing their cloven sides and the sere golden brown of the stubble that covers them. This ache isn’t only envy. Excellent books almost always leave me feeling a bit bereft, as if I’ve lost a part of myself, left it in the pages of the book. (This is perhaps why I reread books religiously: maybe I subconsciously hope that I will find the part of myself that I left behind.) Or maybe it’s that a truly great book enlarges me, and when I finish there is a hole, an aching gap between who I was before I read it and who I am now that I’ve finished it. Maybe it’s both.
An outcrop of red rock rises incongruously between two sets of the wheat-colored hills. Envy. Loss. Both are true, as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. I want to be Gaudy Night. Or at least be in it. Every spring, I have this same aching experience when I see a certain sort of cherry blossom—pale pink blooms drooping their delicate heads from slender stems, whole trees of them, and I want to eat them…but that’s too violent an image. I want to become the cherry blossoms, the cherry tree. I want to be the beauty that I see.
It’s the ache of longing for union and permanence, the ache of longing for my true Home. Watching the golden fields flow by outside my window, I recall my high school and college fancy that when I die, I will meet all the literary characters I’ve ever loved. Even now, I secretly suspect that they exist, fully alive and animate, in some sort of Christian version of Plato’s realm of forms. I imagine myself bantering and laughing with Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, in a perfect place where they do not intimidate me and I can be wholly myself, wholly at home.
This image of laughing with Peter and Harriet, I realize with a stab of further longing, encapsulates the whole of this ache in my chest. And it transforms even my envy into something beautiful: my desire to have written Gaudy Night (or any of the books that awaken this longing) is, at its core, a desire to more intimately participate in them, to become part of them. It is the longing to lose myself in something—or Someone—other and greater than myself.
The hills march nearer, and I see cattle upon them. Black, brown, white-patched, they graze, serene and placid, a marked contrast to my own longing ache. Gaudy Night lies open on my lap, my hands resting on its pages, and the train trundles east. Its whistle blows, long and low, like the first note of evensong.
Photo by Loco Steve, Creative Commons via Flickr.
