The Rabbit Hole of Books

I was rereading Alice in Wonderland and especially struck by Lewis Carroll's vivid description of Alice's seemingly endless fall down the rabbit hole when I realized that for me that bottomless rabbit hole is the realm of books and the chaotic careening that occurs when you leave one good read and reach ravenously for still another.

Something like this happened to me this weekend. You see, in the building where I live in Manhattan, there is a shelf in the laundry room where people discard books they don't want any longer. Occasionally, this shelf becomes a dumping ground for worn-out textbooks or volumes that have been the victims of misuse or bad weather and probably should have been left for recycling pick-up. But far more often the books that end up on this modest shelf are a wonderfully diverse lot.

For instance, and this is one of only dozens of examples I could cite, a couple of months ago, someone put a paperback version of Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" down there. Although I knew the movie made by Elia Kazan pretty well, I had never read the book. I proposed that Karen and I start reading it aloud. We were hooked. The movie remains a brilliant and concise distillation of the themes from the book, but the book is much, much richer in characterization and especially in capturing the feel for turn of the century Brooklyn. Truly, we have laughed, cried often, and been a bit astounded by her portrait of the deep prejudices of that period.

Well, anyway, this weekend, someone decided to unload their C.S. Lewis collection on this laundry room shelf. I found myself skimming through almost everything, from "The Abolition of Man," his work on Christian education, to some of the volumes from the Chronicles of Narnia series to his personal narrative of being converted to Christianity called "Surprised by Joy" to an intriguing volume called "Four Loves." I read through them all, somewhat desultorily, until I encountered "Mere Christianity."

Now, I am no Christian and had no expectation of being impressed by a book trying to make the case for a life devoted to Christianity, but I couldn't help myself. I could not put the thing down. 

Two things struck me about it. One is Lewis's notion of the self. That we gain a strong sense of self only by giving up our focus on the self. And two, that heaven is not a final resting place, not an eternal paradise, but a site of growth and struggle where we have gained a clearer sense how to support and nurture our best possible selves.

As you can tell, I'm not a Christian and I certainly don't believe in heaven, at least not in any sort of conventional sense. But you also never know what you might discover about the world and yourself when you let yourself freefall through that ever present rabbit hole of books.