Inventing our lives

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills, we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people,

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

The above paragraph by Ursula K. Le Guin reminded me of the Larry Watson novel The Lives of Edie Pritchard, which I reviewed here last August ("Someone else's movie," Aug. 24, 2020). Watson tells of a woman, a grandmother by the end of the novel, who feels that throughout her life her identity has been determined by other people, mostly by the men in her life, but also by her parents, teachers, neighbors and friends. She's still trying to find out who she really is, not just what others want her to be.

Edie Pritchard does this without reading books. the "guides" that Le Guin writes about, although perhaps reading would have made her task easier. Reading, especially when we are young, can help us discover who we really are. What fictional characters, what ideas, what individuals in the biographies and history books we read most speak to us, most inspire us, most sound like the person we might actually be?

Books open up possibilities, reveal options we might never have realized otherwise. Perhaps this is one reason some parents actually discourage reading by their children — their kids might get ideas about leading lives different from their own, and that seems somehow threatening.

When Huck Finn, in Robert Coover's novel Huck Out West,  questions Tom Sawyer about why his kinder, nobler views about mankind have changed since their boyhood, Tom replies, "Well, I was still reading books. I've growed up since then." Did Tom discover his true self by ceasing to read books, or did he lose his true self that way? Le Guin would probably choose the second option.

"What a child needs, what we all need," she says, "is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen." Then she adds, "Reading is a means of listening."