Books are astonishing things. I presented a paper on Oscar Wilde at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts back in March, focusing on fantasy and performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. A panelist and I both came to a similar conclusion regarding the way in which art itself is a fantastic thing. Books promise a fantastic transportation, even if it is to the most mundane space of domestic realism. As I said, books are astonishing things.

Books are astonishing things, in part because they allow us to change, if only for a moment, our consciousness. This is particularly useful and important when our worlds are shaken, shattered, torn apart. I posted recently about the fractured coherence of the nineteenth-century and the way in which literature of the time engages with that fracture. I was talking there about large scale epistemological breaks that necessitated a literary response, but there are other fractures that books engage with, other smaller scale ruptures that literature allows us to address and cope with.

One of those ruptures in my life occurred when I was nine. That was the year my dad had a heart attack. It was a rough year in many ways: we had just moved to a new city, I had enrolled in an elementary school in a rough neighborhood, and I was pretty sure that the old Victorian we were renting was haunted. The heart attack was, of course, the worst blow of that terrible year and it scared me far more than the ghosts I imagined dwelling in our unfinished brick-basement.

Seeing someone you love in the hospital is the pinnacle of helplessness for everyone involved. It was my first confrontation with my father’s mortality and it happened at a very young age for everyone involved (I was nine, my father was only in his mid-forties.) That was the first time I picked up The Hobbit, several years before it was assigned to me in middle-school. There was something soothing about the book. It was a retreat of sorts, but it wasn’t escapist. Rather it opened up a world where grave situations occurred and where they were dealt with in a way that felt true. Bad things happen in Tolkien, and there is resolution, but no one escapes unchanged. That is why I say that good fantasy literature isn’t escapist, there is always a price to be paid.  Anyway, reading that book at that moment helped me create a kind of coherence in the world that had been taken from me by the sudden shock of my father’s heart-attack. There was certainty after a fashion in Middle Earth, and I could after reemerging from that book search for that certainty elsewhere.

Right now my father has been dealing with another set of trying medical circumstances. It is twenty-one years later, and my coping mechanism still seems to be the same. I’ve been worried, I’ve been frightened, and I’ve been trying to keep myself together and moving forward towards something productive. The thing that has been keeping me on an even keel, despite the flashbacks I’ve been having to that dire hospital room, has been literature. Most specifically at the moment, Elizabeth Hand’s beautiful YA novel Radiant Days. It is an impressive piece of work, and the way in which Liz works her lyrical magic has been truly helpful. There are strange and bewildering circumstances, worlds pulled apart and stitched back together. And above all there is a passionate commitment to the importance of art and the way it shapes us. I recommend it to everyone.