I was reading one of Jules Verne’s novels when I first experienced the magic of writing. The heroes had just crashed their balloon in the desert. The heat was relentless. They had run out of food days ago and the last drops of water had been gulped down in the morning. My mouth was dry. Suddenly, through the hot, shimmering air, I heard my grandma’s voice calling me to dinner.Article continues after advertisement
Dinner? We have food? There’s water?
It gradually became clear that my late grandfather’s bookshelves held portals. Some of them led to places that were forbidding, almost aggressively inscrutable, while others were easy enough to read but left an eight-year-old feeling that some funny business was going on behind her back. There were Verne’s balloon and submarine expeditions. It was hit and miss, but overall those bookshelves were like the world itself, stretchy enough to accommodate, across decades, both a middle-aged lawyer and his elementary-school granddaughter.
I was about to discover that the magic didn’t end there. Irving Stone’s Michelangelo novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, introduced me to the idea of the artist, the miracle of a person bringing something wholly new and surprising into the world. To a child, this seemed like a conjuring feat. It subverted the way people were defined, how they were spoken of: no, we are not our job, we are not our possessions. We most certainly aren’t our school grades. We are this other magical thing, this creative potential. From coal into diamond, that’s how I perceived it. I remember walking around in a daze after finishing the novel, and feeling exasperated with my grandma for wasting her infinite potential on cooking and washing up.
