The Light on the Page: Seeking Solace in Sad Books
1.
The pages of a book give off light. That is to say, regardless of the exact hue of white used as backdrop for paper or screen, when you open a novel or a book of essays or, most especially, a poetry collection, its pages quite literally illuminate your face as you take them in.
How else but this radiant phenomenon to explain a peculiar practice of mine—a counterintuitive quirk, like choosing to walk up stairs backwards, or watching cable news for reasoned analysis. The strange habit is: When I am sad, I seek out the darkest, bleakest books I can find. The books that, having skimmed the first paragraph of their jacket-flap descriptions, you flinch at before placing them back on the shelf, preferably with their distressing covers facing inward. Has the earth come to an end before the story’s opening sentence? Great. Does its world contain a cast of emotionally damaged characters, so traumatized it seems improbable they’ll ever recover? Perfect. Recount humanity’s race to the bottom, in terms of describing an intrinsic and therefore inevitable manifestation of evil? Wonderful. Ring me up, kind bookseller, so I can bring this volume back to my darkened cave. Maybe then, via some mysterious process of irradiation, the object itself will start to brighten my days.
On its surface, this choice makes no more sense than any of depression’s other masochistic exercises, its self-defeating punishments and denials. It seems reasonable to think that my practice
