A ll our dream worlds may come true.
F airy lands are fearsome too.
A s I wander far from view
R ead, and bring me home to you.
- Salman Rushdie, epigraph to Haroun and the Sea of Stories
I remember a few years ago, the Commissioner of Police in Singapore, Khoo Boon Hui, told me that one of the best things about his postgraduate sabbatical was the time to read. At work, he remarked, one just gets too caught up with daily firefighting and other complexities that the time to read -- a chore in college, now a luxury for working adults -- gets squeezed out.
Mr Khoo was, as usual, right. One of the great pleasures I've had since coming to Claremont has been the time to read. I've appreciated a lot of the reading that I've had to do for my classes; some of the books have been titles I'd heard about for some time but just never got around to reading them (Senge, Hamel, Norton and Kaplan et al). Some of my reading has delved into issues that have more recently stirred my interest, such as nonprofit leadership.
But the greatest pleasures has come from the long-neglected hobby of reading just simply for the fun of it. Over the last few months, I've managed to read Elizabeth Kostova's creepy but gripping The Historian, Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything, and of course, The Book that the whole world had been awaiting for years, the one about the boy with lightning scar and the nemesis who cannot die. (That last one kept me up till two in the morning for three nights running, and then subsequently kept Fiona reading till three or so, and yes, I thought it was pretty good and worth the wait.)
When we were in Seattle two weeks ago, we had dinner at a great little Thai restaurant, Bai Tong. The food was great, and the kids actually managed fairly decently (usually eating out is a huge hassle with them). But more importantly, the restaurant was located a few doors away from Half Price Books. We bought several books there, and I want to devote the rest of this post to one of the books we found there.
*
Half a lifetime ago, when I was 16 or 17, I read Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I still remember chancing upon it while browsing the shelves at either the Bedok or Marine Parade library. And I remember the book itself. Even though by then Salman Rushdie had gained international notoriety because of the fatwa placed on his life in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, it was the cover that caught my eye. It was a beautiful hue of blue, just a touch deeper than the blue of a clear morning sky, not quite azure. Instinctively, I knew that the book had something to say to me, and that it would teach me something important about beauty, love and truth. I took it home and read it in one day. Only a handful of books and poems I have read since then have gripped me with a similar mellifluous magic, a similar acute sense of poignancy and beauty and heartache.
Since then, I have read the book two other times. Over the past 15 years, I have tried to find the exact same edition with the bewitching cover. I knew that with the resources of Amazon and eBay, I could probably track it down fairly easily, purchase it on line and get it shipped over. But I wanted to find it myself, to find it, unexpectedly, in some supermarket aisle or in one of the never-ending book warehouse sales. But I never did.
In Seattle, I finally caved in and bought a different edition, one with a much more plebian (in my mind) cover. And over the last few days, during the kids' bath, I have sat down in the bathroom, supposedly watching the kids (since Emma resolutely refuses to let me out of her sight during bathtime) while reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories again. And once again, despite its less enthralling cover, and despite the attempts by Emma to grab the book and toss it into the bathwater, I have been drawn into its irresistible, exotic and plangent enchantment once again.
There are many reasons why this slim book resonates so resoundingly with me, but I will explain just one. Stories -- the stuff that we tell our children before bedtime, the stuff that we watch on good television, the stuff that we read in books and magazines -- form the most important construct of our lives. One of the villains in the novel dismisses stories as a fanciful waste of time. "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" he asks contemptuously. Facts, he declares, are what's important.
- 'But why do you hate stories so much?' Haroun blurted, feeling stunned. 'Stories are fun ...'
- 'The world, however, is not for Fun,' Khattam-Shud replied. 'The World is for Controlling.'
- 'Which world?' Haroun made himself ask.
- 'Your world, my world, all worlds,' came the reply. 'They are all there to be Ruled. And inside every story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all. And that is the reason why.'
The stories that "aren't even true" represent the most important and most accessible form of democracy. Anything can happen in our stories. The ugly duckling can become a swan. The knight can revive the dying princess. The dancing hippo named Helen can travel around the world looking for friends. Stories empower. They create. They inspire. They are the truest, most ennobling, and most important stories of all, and they give us hope and a sense of meaning. As Joan Didion (who knows a thing or two about telling stories to cope with the deepest, most wrenching tragedies possible) has said, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." The "stories that aren't even true" help us to piece together our fragmented lives so that we can become better people with bigger hearts.
A word about "facts". As we've seen in our own newspapers in this troubled time, "facts" are not always what they seem. I first encountered a suicide bomber in Haroun and the of Stories, in a seemingly more innocent century. Since then, of course, fiction has become a far more chilling fact.
I was a dreamy-headed 17-year old wondering what to do with my life when I first read Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It gave me the confidence to press ahead, to love what I loved and to pour my heart out towards it: stories. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was a love story after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment