Living other lives

The quantum multi-universe theory that physicists like to talk about has been explored by novelists, especially Matt Haig. Peng Shepherd considers the possibilities in her 2024 novel All This and More.

Shepherd imagines a reality TV show in which a 45-year-old woman named Marsh, with a marriage that has lost its spark and a talented daughter who seems to be growing apart from her, is given a chance to explore different lives. She once fantasized about joining a circus, being an actress and so forth. Now she is given a chance to actually live these lives.

Marsh isn't the only once who gets choices. Readers, too, can decide which path they want her to take. Or so it seems. A believer in the sanctity of marriage, I chose paths that promised a second chance with Dylan, her husband. Yet each of these lives quickly led to Ren, a high school boyfriend who hasn't given up hope.

Marsh tries life after life, seemingly finding all the happiness that was missing from her real life. As women always seem to think the men in their lives need improvement, most of the changes in her life seem to be motivated by her desire to make small changes in Ren.

Yet one thing is always true about reality shows. They aren't real. There are all those cameras, for example. And just as the readers' choices seem manipulated, so do hers.

Marsh must eventually face the question of whether a perfect life is what she really wants.

Reading All This and More can be confusing. And it doesn't seem consistent with quantum theory. If you could move from one universe to another, would you remember your life in other universes, as Marsh does? Yet her daughter doesn't — and doesn't even seem aware of all those cameras.

The novel reminds us, as Matt Haig's The Midnight Library does, that the life we have may not really be so bad after all.

Children's books for adults

C.S. Lewis

It was C.S. Lewis who said, "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

C.S. Lewis, of course, wrote the Narnia Chronicles, including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, some of the most popular children's stories of all time. I did not read them until I was an adult. I loved them.

The same can be said about the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and other books supposedly written for children.

Why do certain children's stories — Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Black Beauty, the Dr. Seuss books, for example — have staying power generation after generation? Because adults like them. Parents buy them for their kids, who remember them when they become parents and then buy them for their own children.

Also, parents — at least good parents — read to their small children, usually at bedtime. And children often like to hear the same stories over and over again. They had better be stories that entertain the parents, as well.

I can remember reading Nate the Great and Amelia Bedelia stories with my son. I liked them, too.

Not saying what you mean

Some book titles are just perfect, and one example of this is How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms by R.W. Holder (2002). How could a title be any more perfect than that?

Not saying what you mean is what euphemisms are all about. The trouble is, for a euphemism to work, you have to know what it means. And if you know what is meant, sooner or later you will need another euphemism for the euphemism. Thus we have words and phrases like restroom, bathroom, washroom, lavatory, little girls' room, throne, tearoom, facilities, commode and so on. We don't even know what the original word is that we are trying so hard not to say.

The book is about 500 pages long and with fairly small print. Thus, it contains many, many euphemisms and because it was published more than two decades ago, a newer edition would doubtless contain many more pages.

As you might expect, most euphemisms deal with delicate subjects, especially sex, bodily functions, drunkenness and death. The last 50 pages or so of the book may actually be the most interesting, for here, instead of going euphemism by euphemism in alphabetical order, Holder gives the meaning we are trying to hide and then lists the euphemisms.

The euphemisms for drunkenness go on for nearly three pages. These include such words as battered, bender, boiled, floating, foggy, gone, high, loaded, plastered, ripped, shot, stewed and zonked, and this is just a fraction of the total.

If you don't want to say what you mean, there are clearly many ways to say it.

Some euphemisms have multiple meanings, and so context is key. The word cold, for example, can mean dead or it can mean not interested in sex or it can be a word used to hide a more embarrassing ailment. Or it can simply mean cold.

Sometimes Holder lists as euphemisms words I assumed were not euphemisms at all, words like bisexual and boyfriend. I knew there were euphemisms for bisexual, but is bisexual itself a euphemism? What is it a euphemism for? Holder doesn't say. He just provides a definition, which is what an ordinary dictionary does.

Read before you write

I have said on more than one occasion that more people write poetry than read poetry. That may be an overstatement, but not by much.

How many people have tried their hand at writing a poem or two? Most literate people have probably done so, at least in their youth. I wrote a few poems myself when I was in college. Fortunately for both me and the world, I chose journalism, not poetry.

Gabriel Zaid

Gabriel Zaid goes even further in So Many Books. He opines that many people write books, or at least think about writing a book or talk about writing a book, without actually reading a book, or without reading very many books. With the ease of self-publishing today, virtually anyone can publish a book. I could very easily assemble my blog posts into a book. I can't imagine anyone actually paying money to buy such a book, however, so I don't go to the trouble. But many other people do something similar. It's so easy. You can write that novel you've been thinking about for years or assemble letters or your sermons or your memoirs or all those poems you wrote in your youth and very quickly have a book with your name on it. How cool would that be?

Zaid puts the thinking of many people into words: "Don't ask me to pay attention to you; pay attention to me. I don't have the time or the money or the desire to read what you've written; I want your time, your money, your desire. Never mind your concerns; what about mine?"

Those words convict me, too. I write a blog, but I rarely read other people's blogs. The same may be true of people who have podcasts or who have accounts on YouTube, or TikTok  or whatever. It is even true in conversations. We want to be heard. Never mind about other people might have to say. Instead of listening, we think about what we will say when it is our turn.

Poet Judson Jerome suggested that writers of little-read books, like poetry, should place a five-dollar bill in each new copy. That way readers would be encouraged ... and rewarded. It's a bad idea — writers of little-read books usually don't have spare cash and it would be too easy to snatch the money without reading the book — but it at least addresses the problem.

Zaid has another idea. He suggests a National Regulatory Board of Supply and Demand that would require that you read so many poems before you could publish one poem or so many books before you could publish your own book. Again, it's a bad idea. Do we really want government telling us when we can write something or monitoring what we read? Those barely literate celebrities who hire ghost writers to tell their story would really be stymied.

Yet it is something we should be thinking about. If we want other people to read what we're writing — or hear what we're saying — perhaps we should be more willing to do the same for them.

Reading to live

Gustave Flaubert

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

So what do you suppose that means?

Amusement and instruction are, in fact, the most common reasons for reading. When we read mysteries or thrillers or romances, we probably want to be entertained. If we read history books or self-help books or cookbooks, we probably want to learn something.

But what books does one read "in order to live"? I think all of the above, and more.

Living is about experiences. It's about meeting people, exchanging ideas, learning more about yourself, feeling real emotions, thinking, accumulating memories, developing relationships, loving, forming opinions, becoming a better person and so on.

I don't think reading should be a substitute for living. A person who does nothing but read probably does not have much of a life. Sometimes you must put your book down and go out and actually do something, preferably with someone else. But when we do read, and this may be what Flaubert was getting at, we should read to enhance those real-life experiences, not replace them.

Alleluia to the world

A certain lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world —especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate.

Mary Oliver, Little Alleluias

The poet Mary Oliver died in 2019. Little Alleluias (2025) is a posthumous collection of her writings, both poems and essays. In one of these essays she calls her poems "little alleluias," her "way of offering praise to the world."

She writes in a poem called "The Return": From my mouth to God's ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song.

Even her essays often read like poems. Consider this line from an essay called "Flow." "This enormity, this cauldron of having green and blues, is the great palace of the earth." Doesn't that sound like a little alleluia?

Yet she is at her best in her poetry. True, she sometimes stretches for meaning, yet she shines when she lets the meaning come to her. As she writes,

The poem is not the world.

It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

Sometimes she gets personal, as when she recalls her school days:

I went out of the school fast

and through the gardens and to the woods,

and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught –

Mostly she writes about the natural world that she explored each day of her life since she was a school girl ... and sings her little alleluias.

A blow against the devil

The obsolete book, printed on paper, is both immortal and perishable at the same time.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

Stephen Starring Grant

Stephen Starring Grant spent a year of his life as a rural mail carrier in Virginia and devotes one chapter of his memoir to books. The post office has always treated books as special — there is a lower rate for books — and as a mailman, Grant says he also gave them special care.

He writes that the Jesuits believe "every word you write is a blow that strikes the devil." Then he adds, "Every book I delivered did the same."

He notes that books left in the rain or chewed on by dogs can easily be ruined, and these are things that can happen to book packages left carelessly by mail carriers. All packages, but especially those containing books, needed to be treated with care, he says.

Grant goes into post office history, telling the reasons why books have always been given priority treatment. "With the help of the U.S. Post Office," he writes, "the homestead was no longer some isolated island of humanity. Instead, by a coal oil lamp and later electricity, it became a node in a network, connected to a larger universe of ideas."

The post office has changed through the years, yet books still get special treatment. Grant, for one, doesn't find anything wrong with that.