I have read and enjoyed Andrea Barrett's fiction (particularly The Voyage of the Narwhal-- a novel of "arctic and personal exploration"). So when I started reading the next essay in the 2005 Best American Essays anthology, I was happy to see it was an essay by Andrea Barrett; "The Sea of Information". She writes about a fellowship she received at the New York Public Library in 2001, where she was doing research for a new novel. As it happened, her fellowship began September 10, 2001.
"Like many writers, I found myself unable to write in the aftermath of the attacks--not just fiction, but anything. What was the point? I thought at first, and for a long time after. But of course there's always a point: reading and writing are two of the ways we make sense of our mysterious, sometimes terrible, world. There were reasons why, all through the autumn months, the Main Reading Room at the library was packed with people reading newspapers and books, searching for material on-line, talking to each other and to the librarians. Eventually I took my cue from those people pouring in off the street. It was through reading, which grew into a more directed kind of research, that I first began to try to grapple with what had happened."
I mentioned before that Barrett had been inspired to write a novel based on a old book she found about tuberculosis. Although what had happened in New York was fresh in her mind, she found herself "driven not toward these renderings of what surrounded me but away towards other times and places in which similar events--events that felt analogous --had taken place." What I love about books and reading is that no matter what has happened personally, or internationally--it is rarely new. History has a sad way of repeating itself. And you can usually find something that has been written that mirrors your feelings and emotions perfectly, because probably someone has gone through it already. Barrett concentrated her research and reading on the events that were happening around her characters--WWI particularly--the setting of the novel she was writing.
"Why was I reading all this? Why do all this work, especially when I wasn't writing and didn't know if, when I started again, I'd find a way to use any of it? And especially when I might more usefully have been out in the world, helping someone, fixing something, cleaning up the rubble or raising money or aiding the families of the dead. Instead I read, which is what I do. I read like that--I have always read like that--because it's the only way I know to deeply inhabit a world other than the limited one of my own experience. It's the way I sink into the hearts and minds of invented characters, who incarnate themselves in the odd intersections of apparently disparate fields, and who then, if I'm lucky, manage to understand and articulate what I cannot. Reading, which gives me access to lives I haven't lived, am not living, probably won't live, is how I find my way to writing: in this case, how I found my way back to writing."
I don't think you have to be a writer to relate to the last few sentences in this paragraph. I think reading, for me anyway, is a way to understand the world and the people who inhabit it, and their actions, which at times can seem incomprehensible. I may feel the same things that characters in a book feel, but they give words to those feelings.