Ode to It
I first found It – IT – at 16.
It is imprinted on me, and always will be. A warm burst that rises and fades, but never quite leaves.
11th-grade me started on page 80. Slacker? Maybe, but better than skipping the whole assignment. And somewhere after pp. 80 I found my way to It: a passage describing a woman’s laugh. But not a normal laugh. The great, glittering sincerity when a woman laughs from the depths of her being. That laughter which cannot be faked, which wells out naturally like a gurgling brook, like the jonquils (jonquils?) of spring, that laughter you only hear a few times in life, that spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being...I was stunned. I read, and re-read, and re-read it again. Who knew words could carry such a feeling?
I took a break from It in college. Or at least, I looked elsewhere, away from books, toward drinking and bars. And there were glimpses, sure, but often those glimpses made me anxious, cloudy, and unquenchably thirsty the next morning. Not It. Not as pure as before. Except for on occasion, on lonely library all-nighters, I would google "All the King's Men woman's laugh quote", and suddenly feel better.
After college I returned to books. First I found Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. And just typing those words brings It welling back up inside me. That sepia-toned cover. The memoirs of a young kid who becomes a man while traveling the world chasing shorelines. William Finnegan found It inside crashing blue curls. I found It in the language he used to describe them: glimpses of the infinite, confusions of youth, a mind on fire after a killer 6am set. Certain paragraphs ended so perfectly, so sweetly, I didn't know how to respond. I would pause, stare at the words, look up from the page, make the noise people make at fancy restaurants. What else do you do when you rediscover It?
After tasting It again, I wanted more. And so I read. And read.
Not every books had It. At first, most didn't. They had other things, valuable things: Habit and Grit and Commit. But not It.
So I read some more. And every fifth or sixth book I would get a good feeling. The first few pages would hint at It, or rhyme with It. The glimpses pulled me along, leaning me into the words, and suddenly, boom. It, in Its full glory. And again, I wasn't sure what to do. Pause. Savor. Ponder. Appreciate. Smile one of those smiles where you're trying not to smile, but you can't help yourself, and the smile erupts anyways, even happier than the first smile would have been.
What did I feel in those moments? Disbelief, I think, at the power of language. The way a series of words could be strung together in such a particular way to knock me over with a freight train of IT.
Finally, I found an answer. Or at least an indicator, a way to point to my future self and say "Hey, look, remember when you found It? Right here, this phrase, this metaphor, this stamp of genius as the chapter ended." A symbol I use to light the way through the dark on my second pass. The backwards checkmark.
Whenever I read, I mark up my books. Underlines, sideways lines, checks for the good stuff, stars and page numbers for the really good stuff. But when I find It? A backwards check, always a backwards check. When I re-read a book, or just flip through, I know exactly where to stop and savor.
Certain books flow with so much It, I feel emotional talking about them. So I don't. Or, at least, I dial way, way down before I try to share how I feel. I think I'm over-calibrated on It. Or maybe saying so just makes me feel good. Probably both.
Certain books, certain moments: reading Anam Cara on the beach as the sun was setting. The seashore is a theater of fluency. It disentangles the netted mind. Many of our words today are of the fast-food spiritual variety. We've had an evacuation of interiority. The neon lights of culture leave no room for the candlelit world of the soul. It!
Anthony Doerr: What mazes there are in this world, none more complicated than the human brain, one wet kilogram within which spin universes. It!
Virginia Woolf: What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. And perhaps it never would come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck in the dark. It, It, It!
I find more It in old writing. Words were more forceful back then, before screens drained words of their power. Emerson is my personal King of the It. His essay Nature brims with It. His biography overflows. Self-Reliance is packed with such beauty, I can't figure out what to do about it, except tell people, yell at people, "Look, look! Can't you see It?"
Figuring by Maria Popova's is so densely packed with It, I have yet to finish. I dropped more backwards checks in two chapters than I did my first two years of reading.
My top place to look is novels and memoirs. That's where It hides.
And just what is It? I don't know. That's why it's called It. All I can do is point: a spark of delight you feel in your body. A burst of Yes that strikes you suddenly and never leaves you, even if you forget the exact words. You know It when you see It.
It doesn't have to come from books. Others find It in movies, math, musical riffs, and about 73,000 other places.
But language does It for me.
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Below you'll find my personal collection of candles. They look best with the neon off.
Notes from the End of Everything by Robert Pantano
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
The Razor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Anam Cara by John O’Donohue
A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Figuring by Maria Popova
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Return by Hisham Matar
My Antonia by Willa Cather
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
What if This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky
Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
Rapt by Winifred Gallagher
God’s Debris by Scott Adams
T. Roosevelt: An Autobiography by T. Roosevelt
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro