Reading as a form of therapy

The Great Escape
What do you do when you can’t be here? Read.
by Liz Spikol

Sometimes when I’m bored and alone in my apartment, I do odd half-yoga poses while I read out loud to myself in an English accent. It’s not an accent that would convince any natives, but it’s a persuasive mix of Emma Thompson and the BBC Newshour.

Tonight I watched a truly underwhelming version of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley, and it made me want to talk in that accent again. I think it’s because when I see a period piece like that—especially one based on a book I love—I wish I could live inside it, no matter the tiresome carriage rides, the lack of modern plumbing and the inconvenient matter of consumption and fever.

I’d willingly surrender my messy romances and intergender warfare to the disenfranchisement of the chauvinist Victorian era, if only I could get some rest. Even now as I type on my clickety-click white Mac keyboard, I imagine each letter sounds like a horse’s hoof hitting the cold stone street, and I need only step outside to be pulled into that gray and misty London of whalebone corsets and awkward meetings under umbrellas.

I’ve lately thought my desire to thrust myself into another world—to escape the stupid song of my cell phone, the goofy ding of my email alert, the bleat of the oven timer and the techno crunch of the gym music—may be an incipient sign of depression.

But I can’t say the desire to escape my reality is a new impulse. It started mundanely in the late ’70s, with Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I’ll never forget being curled up on the sofa, willing to live without food and without air so long as I didn’t have to put that book down. “Ah,” I thought. “So this is what life is all about. Reading.”

Was my childhood so terrible that I had to get out? No. But there was something about the tide of narrative that was entirely engulfing and joyous. It worked with movies as well as books. I’m never happier than when I’m in a movie theater, and I feel lonely as soon as the lights come up. My crinkled napkin and popcorn dregs seem like remnants of a dirty truth: I wasn’t in the movie after all.

Movies are precious escapes, rare glimpses of other selves. For the everyday—say, walking to the bus stop—I read a book. On the trolley into work, I read. When I get home, in between chores, I read. When I can’t read, I watch TV—a bleak impersonation of true escape.

What seems intolerable to me is the real world, though I know it’s not that bad. I have food and shelter and central heat and a washer/dryer. I have a few pets and domestic company. Why should I feel so oppressed by what’s here, by what’s real?

Last weekend I went to John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum for a walk. I was pleased by the crunch of the gravel beneath my feet.

A dark green snake wriggled through the weeds, and a band of mallard ducks, shimmering in the sun, did mating dances and dove into the murky water. Here, manifest, was the natural world—mixed, a bit unhappily, with the belching pollution of the 21st century—and I was hardly able to enjoy it. If I had a book to read, I thought, I’d like the walk better.

Lately I’ve taken up photography, which helps. At the refuge I took photos of the trees reflected in the water, and of the strange concrete building there. I had no book, but I created my own narrative and found the story suitably engaging. When I got home, I loaded the photos onto the computer and told myself: “See? I was there.”

My hobby is insistent in its narrative: Single images make me feel unfinished, so I have a street-photo series, a graffiti series, a roadkill series … Each series is a story to tell.

It seems pathetic to me that I’ve never cultivated the ability to sit and stare out into the distance. Maybe I need to know there’s an end to things—that I don’t have to worry about bearing the weight of being here for longer than it takes to finish one book and pick up another.

What does it mean to live this way? Why can’t I be like the guy who moved to Alaska and lived alone for 40 years in a little log cabin? I saw his movie on WHYY, and I thought, where are his bookshelves? Oh my God—how boring: to be alone with yourself.

Maybe it’s not boredom I’m really worried about. When I’m alone, I’m prone to gloomy thoughts, to flashbacks to times when I was sick. I worry I’ll hear voices, so I stomp them out with a British accent and an absorbing novel.

When I’m alone I think about my grandmother. I remember her dying, her wailing, “No more”—not about pain, but about presence. She wanted so badly to be absent.

I know how she felt.

liz | 3:02 PM | Uncategorized