You Are What You Read at the Library

by Bill Peak

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously claimed, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Modern-day foodies have come up with something similar, if slightly more prosaic: “You are what you eat.“ Both maxims are, I suppose, to one degree or another, true.

In my own case, two streams seem to have moved through my life, building and eroding as they went. The first of these has been, of course, life itself, the experiences of love and rejection, success and failure, learning and loss that, in toto, affect and effect a life.

But in my case, and surely that of any lover of the written word, there is that second, somewhat less obvious current: one's reading material.

I'll never forget the uneasiness I experienced when, upon entering sixth grade, I detected an unexpected shift in the behavior of my peers. Boys I had known and played hide-'n-seek with since first grade were suddenly putting Brylcream in their hair, flirting with girls, and talking about cars.

When I compared the great loves of my life (sandlot baseball, fishing, games of kick-the-can and ghost-at-midnight) with these new pursuits, I found the latter decidedly wanting. Why would anyone want to worry about what their hair looked like when they could go outside and climb a tree?

Looking back on it now I realize I was, at ten years of age, just old enough and smart enough to suspect what was being asked of me: that I turn my back on the joys of boyhood and march blindly into what looked to me like a minefield of grown-up responsibility. Peter Pan could not have asked for a better recruit.

And so it was that, in my last year of elementary school, I consciously rebelled against my fellow students' desire to grow up before their time. Taking Huck Finn as my model of the boyhood I wished to preserve, I began wearing a straw hat and took to bicycling through the neighborhood with a cane-pole slung across my handle bars.

I was too young to realize that, even in this, I was showing the first signs of growing up. Instead of imitating, as I had for years, TV cowboys and WW2 combat soldiers, I was imitating a character out of a book.

It was a formula that would serve, and sometimes disserve, me all my life. As a teen I read Hemingway, took up hunting, and, to my shame, began to speak disparagingly of men I deemed unmanly. As a young adult, I read Henry Miller, rented a room in a flophouse and adopted a bohemian lifestyle. It was probably a combination of both authors' influence that drove me, at 24, to Santa Fe. In those days, before Ralph Lauren discovered it, New Mexico's capital still had a sleepy foreign air to it … and I couldn't afford a flight to Paris.

It was during my second spring in the Land of Enchantment that—thanks to the paperback copy of Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth I saw protruding from her purse—I was able to work up the courage to approach the most beautiful girl in town that year. I give Cary's protagonist, Gulley Jimson, another of my literary alter egos, full credit for introducing me to the woman who would become my wife.

Melissa, in turn, introduced me to Virginia Woolf and, for the first time in my life, I found myself trying not so much to imitate a character from fiction as to imitate the fiction itself, to write descriptions true enough to life that a character like Mrs. Ramsey might (I prayed) emerge from my scribblings.

There have been other writers whose talents I have emulated and envied—Alice McDermott, Wendell Berry, Arundhati Roy, Graham Swift, to name a few—and I still come across characters worthy of imitation as well (Berry's Burley Coulter always springs to mind), so that now, at 72 years of age, I can even wonder how much of my life has been of my own making, and how much a mere product of literature.

Which leads me to the following conclusion: If we must be careful about what we think about all day, as it presages what we will become, then we must be equally careful about what we read. The Talbot County Free Library is many things—archive, lending library, refuge, incubator, lecture hall, community hub. But it is also, fundamentally, a forging-place of the soul.