Reading True
By Naomi Kim
When I was nine or so, I began to think I might have a superpower. I had just begun the habit of taking a book along with me wherever I went, and I discovered—to my delight and surprise—that I was capable of reading while I walked. In Walmart, trotting along after my mother with my head buried in a book, I marveled at the fact that I could read and still see the stocked shelves and ambling shoppers around me out of the corners of my eyes. It was amazing. Surely this was some kind of special ability.
Then I found out about peripheral vision. Turns out that what I thought was unique was really just common to us all. I had to abandon my delusions of grandeur. But really, it wasn’t a hard loss, because the grandeur that mattered more to me than this potential superpower were the books themselves. After all, my love for books, for stories, had been the reason I had ever tried to read while walking—and to read while brushing my teeth, and to read while eating, and even, once, to disastrous consequences, to read while pouring a glass of water (ruining a library book and upsetting two parents).
My chin harabeoji, my paternal grandfather—himself an avid reader—joked with me that I should stop spending so much time reading fiction. After all, he teased me, novels were just full of lies. Made-up people. Made-up places sometimes. And even, sometimes, made-up words. But for me, that was the very appeal of stories. I fell in love with reading as a child because of the power of make-believe, but I keep reading because of the power of truth. The best fiction, I have found, never fails to tell the truth. It sets my bones abuzz with something real. Sometimes the truths are unpleasant, like the agony of doubt in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or the frustration of un-belonging in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. But there are also truths which soothe and heal, like the joy and wonder of loving the world in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, or the warmth of love and friendship in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.
These days, I still love to read, but I grapple with a new reality—the study of what I read, or reading as a kind of vocation. Reading for make-believe and reading for truth are one thing, but why study what we read? It was the question that haunted me when I declared my major in English as a sophomore in college, and it haunted me as I applied to English PhD programs two years later as a senior. And if I’m being honest, the question nags at me still now and then. On good days, it seems to me that there is no better thing in the world, and on bad days, I begin to brood and despair. In the library, as the afternoon sunlight streams across the carrels, I scroll through the New York Times, a headache setting in as I think, no novel could ever transform the wreckage we have made of the world. And what a cheap use of my life it seems then, to spend my time turning pages and writing papers.
And yet, in both good times and bad, I find myself turning to words printed on the onion-thin pages of my well-worn Bible, a single verse written centuries ago in a different language, on a different continent, by a man with a thorn in his flesh and a fierce intensity to his convictions. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things…
Not all works of literature are noble, or admirable, or praiseworthy, but literature puts on full display the truth of human experience in all its ups and downs. It exposes the powers and principalities that structure and enslave, corrupt and grieve. It gives voice to the terror and the wonder of our embodied existence. To give sustained, close attention to fiction, I hope, is a way of honoring not only what it means to be human but also of honoring the God who gave us the gift of this existence itself—and who, too, gave us a wealth of stories.
The Bible, after all, is full of poetry and proverbs and parables and complex, gritty stories that refuse to shy away from tragedy or violence, that refuse to clear up all confusion and ambiguity. Jesus, the Word of God himself, spoke in story and metaphor, puzzling crowds and close disciples alike. It seems to me that with those stories, Jesus invites us to look closer, to learn to see more clearly. He invites us to study what we read. And maybe, just maybe, that is what studying literature helps us practice—the sharpening of our sight so that our vision sees the world around us and in us all the more truly.
As a reader, I already believe this.
As a grad student reading in the library, I pray that what honor I show the books before me might open even one small truth of God’s world.
Naomi Kim is a PhD student in English at Washington University in St. Louis and a graduate student member of the Carver Project.