Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.
Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. They teach us to know ourselves better by recognizing ourselves in others.
Books that speak like the noise of multitudes reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of the city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.
- Thomas Merton, who I decided to read today because his name comes up repeatedly in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot
This got me thinking about which category The Marriage Plot would belong in: a book that speaks like God or like men or like the noise of the city. This could be wildly misguided since I don’t know what it feels like to need lithium or to need lithium and take too little, but there’s a scene involving a bipolar character in a saltwater taffy shop that left me wrung out and “recognizing ourselves in others” — a book that speaks “like good men,” in other words.
