Literature Alive
I once worked with a client who, between sessions, did much of her own therapeutic work in darkened movie theaters. There, she identified with characters, related incidents on screen to her own painful past, and experienced a kind of catharsis that eluded her in everyday life. Afterwards, we would weave what she had seen into a deeper understanding of the losses in her life.
While stage plays and films often trigger powerful emotions, literature—which may do that as well—sometimes startles us by opening us to understanding and empathy in unexpected ways. We come away from such books with a more profound understanding, a greater appreciation, and, yes, more depth of feeling for the real people in our lives after we’ve been immersed in lives of fiction.
Especially now, with families scattered, technological distractions so pervasive, attention spans diminished, how often do loved ones pass on before we truly know their stories? It’s nobody’s fault. It just is.
Colum McCann, author of a forthcoming novel, Let the Great World Spin, has written movingly about connecting with a grandfather he barely knew as he read James Joyce’s Ulysses. Writing of this experience in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, he said, “The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.”
And that’s the truth as I know it.
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