Animal Dreams
Last time I read this book, I cried...I remember so clearly, however many years ago, lying in my bed on my back, the weight of the hardcover book pulling my limp right hand down over the edge of the bed, a finger marking my page, and tears and soft sobs rolling out of me. I cried for several minutes. It was wonderful.
I was hoping to recapture this experience, rereading it now, but of course I didn't. I knew exactly what was coming and this time I didn't even feel a shiver or a burning tightness around my eyes. It was disappointing, but predictable.
Rereading the book was not a waste, though, far from it. Tears welled up in my eyes, enough to make me blink hard, and I felt those beautiful cold shivers, at a moment I hadn't even remembered from my first reading:
"A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know."
For some reason, it feels deeply satisfying that I cried reading this. Like I was tapping into some universal sadness of mothers. It made me feel...grown up, for lack of a better term. Maternal? (Not to rely on constructed gender roles...) In any case, it was nice.
Does it mean something that my favorite books are the ones that make me cry? Songs, movies, any sort of art, anything that makes me cry jumps to the top of the list, but it's especially true of books. My dad once said he doesn't feel like crying, for him, really correlates with sadness...of course, "sadness" is so hard to define...in this case, meaning, real pain, something unpleasant and unwanted and bad, something that makes life more oppressive rather than more beautiful. He only really cries, he said, when something is beautiful and touching in a particular way. When a book makes me cry, it's usually something sad happening in the book that does it. But feeling that sadness makes me feel deeply happy. Of course, it's safe to let it make me happy, purely happy, because it's fictional. Maybe in some way, I love crying over books because it's such a perfect way of being able to feel the power and beauty of the emotion of sadness without having anything actually sad happen in your life to complicate your appreciation of the joy the feeling brings, the way it lets you tap into something so deep and beautiful.
Another feeling I love is when I get shivers; I can never predict it, and it's magical. Shivers aren't provoked by sadness. I think I feel them when something I hear or read feels profound and important and elegant.
Then finally, there's a feeling I don't know how to describe. It's not shivers, nor the tightness around my eyes when I'm close to actually crying. But it's close to that...a slight waver of my heart and stillness in my throat, and something stinging around my eyes, with no tears and just for an instant. I have to swallow, blink, and catch my breath afterwards. I can never ever predict or classify what gives me that feeling. It's like for just an instant I've found something that's some key to life, in some way, however small, and it makes my soul jump. I remember it happened when I read, in some paper for adolescence class, a quote from a teenaged girl: "Independence means being able to depend on people." That's the only one that pops into my head. It doesn't happen often. I wish I could remember more. It is such a powerful and beautiful feeling.
I'm not sure, but I suspect the fact that I enjoy books that makes me cry betrays the fact that deep down, I'm very happy. I feel so blessed for that (and "blessed" isn't a word I often use). I hope my children can love books that make them cry.
I was hoping to recapture this experience, rereading it now, but of course I didn't. I knew exactly what was coming and this time I didn't even feel a shiver or a burning tightness around my eyes. It was disappointing, but predictable.
Rereading the book was not a waste, though, far from it. Tears welled up in my eyes, enough to make me blink hard, and I felt those beautiful cold shivers, at a moment I hadn't even remembered from my first reading:
"A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know."
For some reason, it feels deeply satisfying that I cried reading this. Like I was tapping into some universal sadness of mothers. It made me feel...grown up, for lack of a better term. Maternal? (Not to rely on constructed gender roles...) In any case, it was nice.
Does it mean something that my favorite books are the ones that make me cry? Songs, movies, any sort of art, anything that makes me cry jumps to the top of the list, but it's especially true of books. My dad once said he doesn't feel like crying, for him, really correlates with sadness...of course, "sadness" is so hard to define...in this case, meaning, real pain, something unpleasant and unwanted and bad, something that makes life more oppressive rather than more beautiful. He only really cries, he said, when something is beautiful and touching in a particular way. When a book makes me cry, it's usually something sad happening in the book that does it. But feeling that sadness makes me feel deeply happy. Of course, it's safe to let it make me happy, purely happy, because it's fictional. Maybe in some way, I love crying over books because it's such a perfect way of being able to feel the power and beauty of the emotion of sadness without having anything actually sad happen in your life to complicate your appreciation of the joy the feeling brings, the way it lets you tap into something so deep and beautiful.
Another feeling I love is when I get shivers; I can never predict it, and it's magical. Shivers aren't provoked by sadness. I think I feel them when something I hear or read feels profound and important and elegant.
Then finally, there's a feeling I don't know how to describe. It's not shivers, nor the tightness around my eyes when I'm close to actually crying. But it's close to that...a slight waver of my heart and stillness in my throat, and something stinging around my eyes, with no tears and just for an instant. I have to swallow, blink, and catch my breath afterwards. I can never ever predict or classify what gives me that feeling. It's like for just an instant I've found something that's some key to life, in some way, however small, and it makes my soul jump. I remember it happened when I read, in some paper for adolescence class, a quote from a teenaged girl: "Independence means being able to depend on people." That's the only one that pops into my head. It doesn't happen often. I wish I could remember more. It is such a powerful and beautiful feeling.
I'm not sure, but I suspect the fact that I enjoy books that makes me cry betrays the fact that deep down, I'm very happy. I feel so blessed for that (and "blessed" isn't a word I often use). I hope my children can love books that make them cry.
posted by Ashila at 1:46 AM
2 Comments:
The quote it reminds me of something. My family, for when my mother miscarried when I was small, we thought it was going to be a boy.
The thing is that I sometimes wonder how I would be different if I had someone close to my age to hang around with. I know brothers are different then sisters, and I wouldn't trade mine for the world.
Even if she was being a brat. But I think that I would have been very different. More outgoing, more sure of myself becuase I would have had someone to hold on to...someone who could protect me. He was going to be about 18 or 19.
Reading that qoute, that the mother doesn't forget the child, it's the same for a sibling. You may grow older, but you're always going to wonder how they would be. Would they be tall, or short. Would he laugh with me? Would he love me as deeply as I would have loved him....or would we have been more distant.
I'll never know...maybe that's kind of why I want at least one boy in my family, becuase it was something I never experinced.
As for sadness, I don't like to read books that make me cry. I think it just stems from bad memories, or rather the way the story goes. The thee examples of books that made me cry that I can think of are Beat the Turtle drum. Where the heroine's sister is checking on her horse, by climbing over a branch, it brakes, she falls, and breaks her neck.
The others would be 'Where the Red fern grows' which depressed me becuase of the death's of the dogs, and it was too close to my mom's dog Peace dieing. I read it in third grade, but memories of pet deaths are something that stay with you.
The last I can't recall a title. But the girl in it has a older sister that dies of cancer. And the reader has to watch as her sister gets worse and worse. Mind you I read this while My sister was sick, so this didn't help matters. *laughs*
So yes, while I appriacte a good book that will make you cry, I tend to avoid reading them.
Hmm...I think my mom miscarried once, maybe twice. Possibly once after I was born, before my brother. I think they were pretty early miscarriages, not stillbirths or whatever. I've never really talked with her about it in much detail...I certainly have never spent time wondering what those siblings would have been like...hmmm. I guess I just never had any connection to them. And I guess, personally, I feel like souls are given to babies that are meant to come into the world. Maybe a miscarriage happens when someone gets pregnant but there's no soul ready to be born to them yet. To that way of thinking about it, the person never really exists. Just some dividing cells.
Of course, I bet it feels different for the mother, who's actually held this being inside her. Then I bet it's hard not to feel some connection.
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