What five books or writers have mattered to you?

Wendell Berry does this work of measuring various influences on his life in an essay entitled ‘The Long-legged house,’ in Recollected Essays. He describes a place he calls the Camp, a cabin built along the Kentucky River by an ancestor which he then repaired and rebuilt and used for  himself during his life. He writes about what the Camp has meant to him in the context of that place – the river, the woods, the animals. He is particular about many things.

Wendell Berry has attempted to recollect the material of his life in this, and in other writing he has done, and to make some sense out of it. And having done it very well and with thoughts that then resonated in my own mind, Mr. Berry goes to the top of my list of writers. And the links of the chain also work their way back as Mr. Berry also writes of reading Thoreau and other writers that have been important to him, as well.

I have a good collection of books that I have read by Mr. Berry over the years. It would take more time  than I intend to take here to try to understand how his words have shaped my life. But I have no doubt that they have considerably done so, as I find that I repeatedly go back to my bookshelf and read Mr. Berry’s words again, often finding them still potent.

The other book that has had a profound influence in shaping the course of my life is the Bible. I am no fundamentalist in how I interpret the Bible today, but many of its words form a foundation for who I have become. The Bible is a collection of writings, of course, and I have read or heard parts of it over and over again – most often during the time in my life when I was most impressionable.

Lines still come to mind years later: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.” I think that it is in words written down - the ideas that are distilled in ways that then lodge within our memory - that we are formed. We are not merely the dust of the earth.  I am a picker and a chooser with the Bible, to be sure. And over the years, I have returned to the scriptures to reinforce some words and not others. But many words remain a part of me whether or I want them to or not. And it’s not just some of the revealed truths that I still acknowledge, but characters and stories that have instructed me. In the beginning was the Word, says John.

With my first two choices, I think it becomes clear that my original question is not one I will actually answer very completely. I never assumed that I would be able to. Maybe I will manage to illuminate the question. If we give ourselves time, I do believe that we can learn some things from our words and experience. And if we can be somewhat thoughtful and articulate, we can learn from each other.

Books and writing – both in general and in particular- have mattered much to me in my living. I cannot easily tease out precisely where a mark has been made, but I have to recognize that my mind is a kind of village of the words of other writers.

But to dash off a somewhat completed list: there is a science fiction novel called ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula Leguin that I first read while sitting in a library for several days in Frisco, Colorado as a friend and I waited for our ride after backpacking in the Gore Range. I later bought myself a copy and underlined passages throughout. The descriptions of alternate ways of structuring society - of ways people might choose to organize themselves to live freely and yet still share with each other - became solid concepts to hold onto in my mind. I reread the book again recently and was pleased to discover that I remembered the characters and I still appreciated the dilemmas they faced and saw again the vision that still stirred my imagination.

A lot of science fiction that I mostly read in my youth – particularly the books that focused on human culture in some way – surely had some influence on me. I remember Isaac Asimov, and especially his sweeping Foundation trilogy. The details in the first book in that series had less punch upon partial rereading, but the overall sweep still interested me. They were perhaps the right books at the right time. I have mostly forgotten many other books in this genre – although I might still recognize a struck chord if I read them again.

C. S. Lewis straddles some of the areas that mattered to me as I was growing up. His science fiction trilogy and his Narnia stories began to open up a tight and mostly closed system of beliefs about God. There was wonder in his conception of faith, although who knows how he would feel about how far from fundamental Christianity his initial push carried me.

I realize that I will say little about many, many books and authors that changed my life in some significant way - if only I could find a way to identify and measure them. Edward Abbey, Ivan Illich, Annie Dillard. A book called ‘The Shantung Compound.’ A good translation of ‘The Brother’s Karamozov.’ I have loved John McPhee’s descriptions of the world. And books explaining quantum physics and evolution and other aspects of the natural world. And books that attempt to explain the human mind and why we think and do the things we do.

This quick recollection of books that matter to me is about these mentioned books and also ones that I’ve forgotten. And what about a number of bad books - books that I never bothered to finish? Even some of those should receive honorable mention in a role call of books and writers that have were important to me – some slightly useful piece of writing, long forgotten, that I happened upon in books I assumed were only a waste of my time.

Here’s a word from William Faulkner: ‘...how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it...’ And yet words become doing – or ‘flesh’ as it was written by King James - when they shape human beings. As it turns out, much of the shaping of what I think has been done by writers. I am, of course, most grateful for the good ones that I have read.