The Vast Gamut of Love

The innocence of a child of loveless parents is heart-rending. This child doesn't understand how deficient his life is, he only knows the yearning to be loved, instead of beaten, berated and neglected. A child blames himself for his punishments and never misses the love he has never known.

Through my impoverished and violent childhood, I found the yearning I had for love in books. In books parents were sometimes loving, sometimes not, and gave me hope.

Right before I was thrown out of my mother's house and dropped out of high school, I discoved Salinger's short stories, and Zooey enraptured me. Love is a constant theme in most literature, but Zooey opened up, like the emerging universe, the idea that love has far more expansive possibilities and divers modes; like medieval mysticism, like a goddam bowl of soup refused over and over but still offered, like the fat lady listening.

There are more recent stories that move me, but Zooey was the first light bulb in the thought balloon of my life.

When I was still in school, they called me gifted, allowed me to attend special schools, punished me for stealing into the bookroom to read the stories in textbooks of grades ahead of mine. Friends of my socioeconomic level yelled at me for bringing books along wherever I went.

I had a friend who always carried a Composition Notebook with him, like Harriet the Spy in my favorite childhood book, and wouldn't show anyone what he was writing. I started to do this too, though I never stopped anyone from reading mine. He also read Proust, in the hope that someday a beautiful girl would sit down next to him on the bus and say, "I see you're reading Proust."

It took me ten years to read Remembrance of Things Past, as it was called back then. I read the first three books over and over, until I could find a copy of the next volume. I remember reading it laying on the thin foam rubber mat wrapped in dirty curtain fabric that I slept on when I lived under Ead's bridge.

Reading assures us, even in times of desperation, that there has always been the hope of love.