Growing into it

[mrissa]

The thing about Tam Lin is that I've been growing into it since I got my first copy, and I think I got my first copy when I was 13 or 14. I loved it immoderately at the time, but in some ways I was entirely too young for it: things that should have been references were instead questions I had to get answered. I don't mean sex, drugs, or literature, I mean that I learned the bit about "if it doesn't work, it's physics" from Tam Lin, as no one had seen fit to inform my adolescent self of this maxim about my intended profession. So in less than two pages, I go from grinning at how that bit waas when it was new to me to having tears pricking my eyes at this:

Janet found in her mind the words of some of Tolkien's people, discussing the story they were in and how they might end it. Bilbo had thought of, "And they ll lived happily ever after until they died. It is a good ending," he had said, "and none the worse for having been used before." "Ah!" said Sam, "but where will they live? That's what I often wonder." Janet wondered, too. For four years they would live here. After that, unless somebody made a prodigious and possibly miraculous effort, they would scatter to the four corners of the world, their fellowship broken, and do what all of them had done to be here in this room now: find new friends. It seemed wasteful. Perhaps they could buy an island somewhere.

The first time I read that, I didn't really understand it. I knew what was meant, but I didn't know how it felt. It was interesting. It was, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy: it told me that I could go off to college and love a group of people like that, and quote things at them and get quoted back at, and live in each other's laps for awhile and be sorry to lose each other. The kind of college I chose and the kind of friendships I found were informed by that. When I reread it in the winter of my sophomore year, I kept sighing the kind of sigh that means, yes, it really is like that.

And now I'm reading this bit, and I miss gaaldine and the_overqual so very much, but also I am selfishly, selfishly grateful that Pamela didn't get an island and neither did I, because it would have been a great shame if they'd been different islands.

Different things snag me each time I read it. When Nora the RA is worried about the kids doing drugs down the hall and says one of them will go out a window, I stick my finger in the book and close my eyes and remember how shaken and scared we were when one of my physics compatriots did just that. But mostly it's not just a college book for me any more. I've been having a think about heart of flesh and heart of stone stuff again, and I've put my finger on the problem with some of the other Tam Lin stories I've read (and written), and I'm writing a story that is and isn't a Tam Lin story, and it's going all right, maybe. It's going, at least. There's more swimming. I'm not sure why the swimming lately. But if there has to be swimming, I suppose there can be swimming. At least it's not mice again.

What books have you grown into? What books do you get now in ways you didn't used to?

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

What books have you grown into?

GAUDY NIGHT, which I read first in 8th grade, then again in high school, getting some of the literary references, and then in college, when it all made a lot more sense (I went to a women's college).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't read Gaudy Night until 2002. I should reread it one of these days, but I think it's much less of a perspective shift than it would have been if I'd read it that young.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The first time I read that, I didn't really understand it. I knew what was meant, but I didn't know how it felt.

Bob Dylan's Dream (http://bobdylan.com/songs/dream.html)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The link to that is 404ing on me, and as a result I am free to imagine Bob Dylan singing "Pilate's Dream" from Jesus Christ Superstar.

I think this is what they mean when they say freedom includes the ability to make the wrong decisions.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much what you (and Pamela) wrote. The last half is:

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold,
We never thought we could ever get old.
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one.

As easy it was to tell black from white,
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right.
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split.

How many a year has passed and gone,
And many a gamble has been lost and won,
And many a road taken by many a friend,
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room again.
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

Well, OK, not exactly the same (since I don't think you're trying to go back). For some reason I know all the songs from Godspeel but only a few from JCS. But I can't quite see Dylan as Pilate. (Thomas, maybe?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dylan Thomas might make an admirable Pilate, yes.

But that song seems like the opposite, almost: wanting to go back, but also not appreciating it at the time, which I did, and while we don't have data on pameladean's personal experience, her character Janet was certainly appreciating it in the moment and had a fair notion of greyscale morality, and she was thinking exactly that the road they traveled would shatter and split.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Maybe. I wouldn't say "not appreciating it"; "not appreciating its ephemerality", maybe.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The whole passage was about appreciating its ephemerality.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

*stamp* Well fine then! :-)

Somehow Dylan rings a little truer for me than Janet in that he's appreciating his friends but not that things will change; it seems like that's a hallmark of early youth, not realizing change will happen, because so many things have been the same for your entire life. Then again, Heinlein once gave a speech saying that that's exactly the advantage specfic readers have, that they can appreciate change without having to be old enough to have gone through it. And Janet does read fantasy and SF, so maybe that's it.

Incidentally, to answer your initial question, Jane Austen was the one I had to grow into. Couldn't read her at 18, loved her at 23 or so.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's more of a personality thing than an age thing. There are plenty of old people who handle change very badly and with a good deal more surprise than seems warranted.

[pameladean]

I agree with you that it's a personality thing. I suffered from hiraeth when I was five, for goodness' sake. I have been change-averse since I can remember being anything.

P.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Ditto on Jane Austen, though for me the relevant ages were 13 and 18.

I suspect seeing Sense and Sensibility as a movie may have had something to do with it too, heretical as that statement is.

Bob Dylan

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

Dylan is not one of the writers usually considered sharply intelligent, in that academic sort of way some prize. However, I tend to find him very wise, and he has a very good eye for feelings.

I remember that song. I've felt the way it says. He and Willie Nelson are coming nearby, and I'd love to go, but I don't think I'm where I can justify paying 60 (50 + surcharge) to hear that rough and weatherbeaten voice again, much as I love it.

Mack

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Can I have a poem instead of a book?

If I get a poem, it's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

I read voraciously as a teenager, but most of the books didn't really stick with me. One that did is Joan D. Vinge's Catspaw. I love that book, and when I first read it, I loved it because of Cat. Now, when I reread it, I love it because of the complex world she's built, the undercurrents of power and politics, the idea that a pawn does have a certain amount of power. I totally didn't get that when I was 15.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course you get a poem. You can have an interpretive dance if you like. We are not narrow here.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

No interpretative dances for Natalies.

I hated Prufrock when I first read it. Thought it was stupid and meaningless. Now, it's one of my favorite poems and totally the one I quote from the most often. I can't say why, exactly, it resonates so strongly for me now, but it does.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I'm currently re-reading Great Expectations. My mom studied Victorian English Literature when in college, and I always thought I should be able to read Dickens more or less fluently. Only in the last few years have I truly been able to recognize his subtle humor and read him for pleasure rather than penance.

I especially did not get what a complete and utter git Pip was until this re-reading. Possibly because the last time I read it I was about 14.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dickens, for me, is like that person your friends mostly like, but you really can't stand. It's not that I don't get him. It's that I don't want him.

Even gaaldine's affection for him could not sway me.

[pameladean]

I grew into Hamlet and The Once and Future King and all the novels of Louisa May Alcott. Sometimes then I grew partly out of them, but never all the way out.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've been picking my way through my old Alcotts now that they live with me again. I find I have the urge to yell rather a lot. I also find that this doesn't dampen my urge to keep reading them.

[pameladean]

Oh, yes, precisely. She's good. But like most of us, she has huge blind spots, some natural to her temperament and some imposed by outside forces.

P.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Does the Bible count?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, the Bible is an anthology, not a single work.

You're allowed to grow into various books of it individually, though; that's fine. You can even grow into all of them individually in some of the same ways, since many of them are on related themes. But I'm standing by the anthology claim here.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

All of them individually, then.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But not at the same rate, I shouldn't think?

It would be very hard to grow into 1 John and Song of Songs at exactly the same rate.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

No, not at the same rate. That's hard to judge anyway: some books I recoiled from when younger, and now I can see value in; some books I liked, and now I love. Which is the more grown into?

[mkille.livejournal.com]

The first time I read that, I didn't really understand it. I knew what was meant, but I didn't know how it felt.

I've known that feeling forever. I can remember being very young, learning about college, and being horribly upset that my brother was going to *go away*. And later, I felt it about my friends. I think it's part of why I didn't make so many friends in college; it was not a time I could take on any more loss, even in anticipation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

People going away was something I understood. But missing people as a group was not. Even my herd of AcaDec friends in high school I missed individually or not at all, and with the prospect of college ahead of me, there was no chance that I'd mope for the time we wouldn't have together. It wasn't until college that I had groups I missed (and continue to miss) collectively as well as individually.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

But losing the individual(s) was losing the group. My family without my brother there wasn't going to be the same family. My family without my friends and my brother's friends coming in and out, *that* wasn't going to be the same family. I've always had an attachment to the collective.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But if you didn't have the group as important in the first place, losing the individual(s) would entirely overwhelm losing the group.

I would know.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I sometimes feel such a powerful loss about not being able to see my best Seattle friends when I really miss them. Like right now.

Chris

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Continents are damned inconvenient things, is my take on this subject, and oceans are worse. I'm sorry you're finding them so, too.

[ktempest.livejournal.com]

when i was in high school and forced to read Lord of the Flies, I was annoyed b/c I had tried to read that book when I was 10 and found it stupid. When I was 15 it suddenly made sense, go fig.

i recently started reading Temple of my Familiar again. I read that book when I was a wee one - I want to say 10 - 12, somewhere in there. the language captured me and the images from it - oh lord, i still remember lines from that book. But I never finished it because I really didn't get it at the time. Luckily, I was mature enough to understand that I wasn't mature enough to really get the book, so i put it down. last night I picked it up again and I'm remembering things about it, how it made me feel, the language, the images I remember, and it's wonderful. i haven't yet gotten to the place where I stopped the first time, but I hope that when I do I will feel better prepared to enjoy the book and 'get it'.

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

The Great Gatsby was an aggravation when force-fed to me as a high school sophomore and a revelation when I rediscovered it at 24. Honestly, it was like someone replaced my regular old book with Folger's Literary Crystals. I noticed.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In our high school, it was a junior year honors English book, and junior year is the one I skipped. So I was perfectly free to read The Great Gatsby on my own at 19, without anyone jamming it down my throat. I think it went much better that way. I reread it at 22 and still liked it, but I couldn't do much with Tender is the Night.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Most of the "classics" have only become accessible to me now that I have some experience. I finally managed to get through Anna Karenina a few years ago, and LOVED it, after years of not being able to get through the first few chapters. I haven't "re-read" in a long time, I'm only just starting to look at things I've set aside for many years.

Your comments on "fellowship" are interesting. My college experience wasn't nearly that intense or cohesive, in part because I worked my way through college, and had to transfer home after two years. But my first semester definitely had that tone, and I still look back at it as one of the most amazing chapters of my life. I always felt something had been stolen from me because I only got a few months of it, and not full four years like most people. They all got to keep bonding, I had to go work as a nanny. I don't have many friends left from college, though certainly a few acquaintances I'm sorry I couldn't know better before they all went to their seperate lives.

However, I am still experiencing the dissolution of the "fellowship" most acutely when friends get married. To me, marriage, more than a career, or a cross-country move, is really the breaking point for the fellowship. A new legal and personal bond trumps whatever fellowship once existed, loyalties and priorities shift.

I have been on both sides of this barrier, (I haven't been married, but I was in a serious longterm, live together thing, which isn't the same, but certainly has its similarities.) but it is one of the things I find profoundly disturbing about longterm romantic relationships. Is there still room for fellowship after marriage? Is there still room for fellowship when the original has been broken? How does one go about finding fellowship, after the college years are over?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is not an easy question, but it can be done. Maybe. It can be done with my experience of fellowship. I'm not sure if you're looking for something different, from what you've said here, because my experience is not that marriage is the breaking point at all. My most obvious group with whom I had that kind of fellow feeling was the group I refer to as "the old crowd," "the crowd," or "the group" from college, and one of the strongest times I ever felt that fellowship with them was the day two of them got married. And when I got married myself, I felt that fellowship from the crowd behind me. My awareness of their presence was a big and important part of my own wedding day; it was a tangible thing for me.

I think part of why it worked that way for us is that -- at least by the time I got to them, they were mostly older than me by a couple of years -- there were already couples within the crowd when I got there. Ed and Jen were a couple, but it didn't make them any less part of the group. the_overqual and Erica were, and when they broke up later, the group kept both of them. We always knew that there would be shifts in priorities and shifts in loyalties, but having serious pair-bonds within the group didn't detract from it. When I came along, I think it was very clear to them that they were not losing a markgritter but gaining a mrissa.

Maybe it wasn't the pre-existing couple-ness of it as the size of the group -- if it had been smaller, it might have been more unified, but with the number of people involved, you could already tell that Em and Amber were best friends above and beyond the rest of the group, that some people would choose to room together and others would not, that you could have higher loyalties and still be loyal to the group. When Amber moved out to our area after college, we were a little nervous (we've laughed about it since), because she and I hadn't hung out much together, and we didn't know how we'd get along having to see each other without everybody else. But it didn't occur to either of us that we didn't have to see each other, because, well, the crowd. That's just how it was.

I think some marriages don't have room for fellowship with others in them. Some marriages don't have room for anything but the married people and maybe, possibly kids. I suppose they work for some people. I don't believe they're a good idea, myself.

How one finds them...that's hard. That's extremely hard. Because I know how to find friends, and I have found fellowship after college, but I don't know how to state it reproducibly. You turn up places, and you give people a try. Sometimes you wind up with a kitchen table surrounded by people and your heart sings to have them there with you and with each other, and you step back from getting just one last finishing touch on the meal to watch them laugh together, and it's more good than you know how to say, so instead you chirp, "Forgot the butter!" and sit back down again and just enjoy it. And sometimes you "merely" end up with nice people you're fond of. I don't know how to make it go one way or the other. But it can.

[wonderlandkat.livejournal.com]

I also grew into Tam Lin. When I was in college I made it a practice to read it on the plane out to school in the fall and the one away in the spring, which was a very illuminating experience, even if I'm on my second copy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We're on our second as well, but sdn is doing a rerelease, so the cavalry is coming.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

There were a lot of books that I read when I was a little to young for the nuances, mostly because I had nearly free run of my father's bookshelf.

Zelazny's stuff is deeper now than it was when I was in junior high.
Catch 22 was like a whole new book.
Retief is even funnier when you get the less blatant jokes.

I had a similar experience with Tam Lin. There have been a few books that changed after I had a child. I first reread The Diamond Age while Bri was in the hospital at 5 days old.

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

Wave Without a Shore by C J Cherryh.

One of my best girlfriends at the same age understood and liked Wave and I was frustrated that I couldn't even read it. That she liked it was what made me go back later and try again--three or four years later. There was another Cherryh that I didn't really like and put off reading as a result; I did eventually read it, but I didn't like it a lot then either.

I honestly don't remember not 'getting' a book or reading one again and feeling I'd grown into it, for anything else. I was one of those precocious readers (I expect you know!) and I'm still really good at the suspension of disbelief part. I read Tarzan and the Jewel of Opar, She, Lord of the Rings, Haggard and Merritt's books, and such, before I was ten. Not being able read to Wave Without a Shore shocked me.

I have put a few things down because I just plain didn't like them. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think that I didn't get Tam Lin the first time around. I think there was enough there that it can improve with rereading, which is not true of every book.

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

I probably reread more books than you do (I haven't your long list of things to read, or stacks sitting around waiting for me), so I think with most books either I appreciated them the first time and they got reread in the normal course of events, and appreciated again, but not necessarily more or differently, or I didn't bother with them because I didn't care for them. So I guess I don't fit into your category. :)

I have reread things that didn't hold up over the years, as far as keeping me interested as a reader, which I think is sort of the opposite.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, I suppose not. Sigh.