Read The Best of Connie Willis Online
Authors: Connie Willis
The Best of Connie Willis (61 page)
“Time heals nothing,”
Peter De Vries said.
And Margery Allingham said,
“Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied, and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot.”
And when I discovered science fiction a year later,
Robert Sheckley said,
“Never try to explain to yourselves why some things happen and why other things don’t happen. Don’t ask and don’t imagine that an explanation exists. Get it?”
And Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days”
and John Crowley’s “Snow”
and Tom Godwin
taught me everything there is to know about death
and memory
and the cold equations.
But there were also hopeful messages in those books.
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,”
Thornton Wilder said,
“and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
And Dorothy, in
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
, said,
“Never give up.… No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”
“If you look for truth,”
C. S. Lewis wrote,
“you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair.”
I found what I was looking for,
what I needed,
what I wanted,
what I loved
in books
when I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Francie and the public library and books saved my life.
And taught me the most important lesson books have to teach.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,”
James Baldwin says,
“but then you read. It was[books that] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
And the narrator in the movie
Matilda
says it even better:
“Matilda read all kinds of books and was nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships onto the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: ‘You are not alone.’ ”
I told you about falling in love with books
that day I got my library card,
that day I opened
Have Space Suit
and read that first page,
that day I discovered the Year’s Best collections,
but it wasn’t just that I fell in love with books,
with science fiction.
It wasn’t just that they were there when I needed them.
It was that when I found them,
I also found,
like one of Zenna Henderson’s People,
or the Ugly Duckling
or Anne of Green Gables
or Harry Potter,
my true family,
my “kindred spirits,” as Anne calls them,
my own kind.
And, finding them,
for the first time I knew,
like Ozma released from the witch’s spell,
like Deckard in
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
like Bethie and Jemmy and Valancy,
who I really was.
I had escaped,
but it was not from the real world.
It was from exile.
I had come home.
Just like in a story.
And I lived happily ever after.
Books are an amazing thing.
Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality
or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside
and play
as merely a distraction
or an amusement
or a waste of time
is dead wrong.
Books are the most important
the most powerful
the most beautiful thing
humans have ever created.
When Kip and Peewee find themselves on trial for earth
and trying to defend it against the charge
that it’s a danger which should be destroyed, Kip says,
“Have you heard our poetry?”
And what better defense of us could you come up with?
Books can reach out across space
and time
and language
and culture
and customs,
gender
and age
and even death
and speak to someone they never met,
to someone who wasn’t even born when they were written
and give them help
and advice
and companionship
and consolation.
In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,
“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man
.
Nothing else that he builds ever lasts
.
Monuments fall;
nations perish;
civilizations grow old and die out;
and, after an era of darkness
,
new races build others
.
But in the world of books
are volumes that have seen this happen again and again
and yet live on
,
still young
,
still as fresh as the day they were written
still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”
They are a miracle of rare device.
I never met Louisa May Alcott
or Robert Heinlein
or Rumer Godden or L. Frank Baum or Philip K. Dick
or Thornton Wilder or Dean Matthews of St. Paul’s,
but they reached out to me
across time,
across space,
and spoke to me
encouraged me
inspired me
taught me everything I know.
Saved my life.
And filled it with wonder.
And I just wanted to say thank you.
Being the sort of obsessive neurotic I am, I wasn’t sure exactly what would be required of me when I was given the Grand Master Nebula Award, so I wrote a couple of speeches, “just in cases” as Aurelia says in
Love Actually.
I only ended up having to give one speech, but here, for your delectation, is the other
.
People keep asking me how I feel now that I’m a Grand Master,
and there are a lot of answers to that.
I feel incredibly honored
and humbled
and awestruck to find myself in such exalted company
as Robert Heinlein
and Joe Haldeman
and Bob Silverberg
and my dear friend Jack Williamson.
(My first thought when I found out about the Grand Master Award was, “He would be so proud of me.”)
I feel all of those things,
plus dismayed to find myself old enough to be made
a Grand Master
and delighted to have been named
and worried that I’ll wake up any moment now
and find that it was all a dream.
In short, I feel like Frodo
and Kip Russell
and Alice.
But mostly,
I feel like Beatrix Potter.
In the middle of World War II,
a reporter interviewed Beatrix Potter.
She was a very old lady by that time—
she would have been eighty-four, I think—
and she was living on a farm in the Lake District,
raising sheep for the army to turn into wool for uniforms,
and dealing with rationing
and food shortages
and fuel shortages.
At that particular moment,
she was dealing with a German plane
that had crashed in one of her fields,
as well as the aches and pains of being eighty-four.
And with the war.
Because Hitler had conquered Europe
and was sinking dozens of convoys
and bombing cities all over England,
and it looked like he might invade any minute.
And if he did, everybody knew what would happen—
conquest and executions and concentration camps.
But when the interviewer asked Beatrix Potter
what her greatest wish was,
she said,
“To live till the end of the war.
I can’t
wait
to see how it all turns out!”
That’s exactly how I feel.
It’s how I’ve always felt.
It’s why I started reading in the first place:
to find out what happened to Cinderella
and to Peter Pan,
to find out whether the twelve dancing princesses got caught
and whether Peter Rabbit made it out from under
Mr. McGregor’s flowerpot
and whether the prince was able to break the spell.
And it’s still the reason I read,
and I think the reason everybody reads.
Forget subtext
and symbolism
and lofty, existential themes.
We want to know—
what happens to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy
and Frodo and Sam
and Scout
and the Yearling.
Does Lear get there in time to save Cordelia?
Does Eliza Doolittle come back to Henry Higgins?
Does Orpheus make it all the way back to the surface
without turning around to make sure Eurydice is following him?
We’ve
got
to know.
A friend of mine said that when she went to see
the Leonardo DiCaprio–Claire Danes version
of
Romeo and Juliet
,
she saw two young girls come out of the theater crying.
“I didn’t know they
died
!” one of them sobbed to the other.
I know. I laughed, too.
But what if you didn’t know how
Romeo and Juliet
ended?
What if you were seeing it for the first time?
How fast did you race through the pages
the first time you read
Lord of the Rings
?
or “The Cold Equations”?
or
The Hunger Games
?
Or
Rebecca
?
Or
Les Misérables
?
How late did you stay up to finish the book?
When
The Old Curiosity Shop
was coming out in serial installments,
people in America thronged the docks
and called up to ships arriving from England,
“Did Little Nell die?”
I recently got addicted to
Primeval
,
a British TV series about dinosaur hunters in modern-day London
and I watched Season One in one fell swoop
and then called my daughter at five in the morning—
and she lives in California, so it was four there—
but she didn’t answer the phone drowsily,
or in a panic because the only reason you get a call at five in the
morning is because something terrible has happened.
Instead, she said calmly, “Hello, Mother. I assume you’ve just watched Episode Six.”
I had indeed.
And then I neglected everything else in my life
to watch Season Two.
And Three.
Both seasons were out on DVD,
but then I had to watch Season Four
as the episodes came out—a week apart—
and then wait six months for Season Five to start—
and it nearly killed me.
Trust me.
If there’d been a ship I could have shouted up to, to ask,
“Do Connor and Abby make it back okay?”
I’d have been down at the docks in a flash—
and I live a thousand miles from the nearest coast.
Why is that such a powerful desire, to know what happened?
And what is it we really want to know?
Is it what’s going to happen to Frodo and Sam?
Or what’s going to happen to us?
Characters in stories grow up
and go off on quests
and fall in love
and find out terrible things about their parents
and even worse things about themselves
and explore strange planets
and travel through time
and lose battles
and win wars
and give way to despair
and solve mysteries
and figure out what matters
and find love
and save the kingdom
and in the process they tell us about ourselves.
They show us what matters
and what doesn’t.
They teach us how to be human.
And tell us how our own stories might turn out.
But Beatrix Potter already knew how her life had turned out.
She already knew
that you can’t ever tell what’s going to happen next.
She wrote a story for her niece
and became a world-famous author.
She fell in love with her publisher
and got secretly engaged to him against her parents’ wishes,
and he
died
.
And then,
when all hope seemed lost,
she fell in love again
and found all the things she’d ever dreamed of.
She already knew what had happened in her life.
So what did she mean when she said she wanted to see
how it all turned out?
Was it who won the war?
Or something bigger?
Did she mean did they win the war? Or something else?
In
Blackout
and
All Clear
,
the elderly Shakespearean actor Sir Godfrey
asks the time-traveler Polly, “Did we win the war?”
and when she says yes,
meaning far more than just the war they’re in at that moment,
he asks,
“Was it a comedy or a tragedy?”
I think that’s what we really want to know when we read.
And we don’t mean just our own stories,
we mean the whole shebang—
the world
and the war we’re always in
and the whole arc of history—past and future.
Is it a comedy?
Or a tragedy?
Or, horrible thought, a TV show that gets canceled
before it has a chance to wrap things up properly?
Literature is the only thing that can tell us.
History could, maybe,
but we’re not around long enough to find out what it has to say.
Will Ferrell’s character
in
Stranger Than Fiction
carries around a notebook and tries to keep track of the clues
to what sort of story he’s in,
but that doesn’t work, either.
So literature’s our only hope.
And no single book
knows the whole answer
No single fictional detective
—not even Miss Marple,
not even Sherlock Holmes—
can solve this mystery.
But each character
each book
each author,
from Graham Greene
to Homer
to P. G. Wodehouse
to Philip K. Dick
to Beatrix Potter
holds a clue.
And every book we read,
every movie
and TV show we watch,
Dr. Who
and
Moby Dick
and Nancy Drew
and “The Light of Other Days”
and
Lolita
and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts”
and
Oedipus Rex
and
Bridget Jones’s Diary
and “The Ugly Duckling”
and
Barefoot in the Park
and
Gaudy Night
and “Nightfall”
and
Our Town
and “The Veldt”
and
Le Morte d’Arthur
and
Miracle on 34th Street
and even
Twilight
has a piece of the answer.
It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
When my husband’s teaching how science figures things out,
he does a science experiment
in which he cuts up a mystery novel
and then passes out random single pages of it to his students,
and they try to figure out what’s going on,
to solve the mystery.
That’s what we do, too.
We’ll never have all the pieces.
But with the help of books
and movies
and even TV shows about dinosaur hunters,
we can get a glimpse of the answer.
That’s why I read
and why I write,
adding my own fragment to the tangle of clues,
and will go on doing both till I can’t anymore.
To find out what happens
To find out what kind of story we’re in.
When Sir Godfrey asks Polly, “Is it a tragedy or a comedy?”
she answers with certainty, “A comedy.”
I think so, too.
Mostly because of clues I’ve found
in
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
and
Three Men in a Boat
and
The Tempest
.
I wanted desperately to find out what happened to Kip and Peewee,
but I also wanted them to be okay,
to get home safely.
I think that’s a good sign,
that we not only want happy endings for ourselves,
but for the people we love,
both real and fictional:
for Connor and Abby on
Primeval
and Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars,
and Kate and Petruchio,
and Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.
And I think another good sign is that
J and George and Harris,
the three men in a boat
(to say nothing of the dog Montmorency),
make us laugh out loud a hundred years after they made
their trip up the Thames.
But I think the best clue of all is that
Shakespeare, whom nobody would accuse of being unrealistic
about the human race—
or of always looking “on the bright side of life”—
was a huge fan of happy endings.
He put them in all of his comedies
and even some of his tragedies.
Cordelia’s hanged and Lear dies,
but not before they’re reunited,
not before all their sins against each other are forgiven
and they have a chance to “sing like birds in a cage” together.
And even more significant
is the fact that he went
back
to comedy
after he’d written the tragedies.
His last word on the subject isn’t
Macbeth
,
but
The Tempest
.
The Tempest
is a play that’s famous for its elegiac speech:
“Our revels now are ended …
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces
,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself
,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded
,
Leave not a rack behind.”
But the play doesn’t end with that.
It ends with a reconciliation
And a blessing
And a wedding.
I think it’s definitely a comedy.
I’m not absolutely certain, of course.
But I have hopes.
And, just like Beatrix Potter,
I can’t wait to find out.