Ever since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shortcut for gauging compatibility. As my friend Leslie likes to surmise: “I bonded with my husband over a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But, then again, we were young and loved to screw.” Okay, so Rand was an accomplice to some serious foreplay. Sex, aside. The fact that my friend and her future spouse shared a love of literature, lit the fire that still burns today (pretty much argument-free). As she puts it: “Finding out whether or not a potential life-partner reads – as well as what he reads, is crucial in determining whether the romance has legs.”
I, too, fell deeply in love with a boy over the writings of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – one of the singularly intimate romances I’ve ever allowed myself to experience. Luckily, philosphical co-readings quickly exploded into a multi-storey tome of other beautiful connections (’cause really…how long can a couple exist solely on philosophy anyways)?
Him: “Blech…this milk is off.”
Me: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Me: “Wanna catch a movie?”
Him: “A paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions, it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.”
Me: “Will you QUIT it!”
Him: “Don’t you get all Jean Paul Sartre on ME!”
Would I have been so spellbound had he, for example, professed a fondness for Super Hero comics or Calvin and Hobbes? (Well, OF COURSE). Okay. But, what if he’d never heard of…say…Camus…or…Steinbeck? Would it have been a deal-breaker?
I like to think not.
The relationship ended for another reason. But, it does remind me of a time, many years ago, when I was packing to move into a new apartment. Due to a serious lack of planning, I was able to take just one box to my place that night. What made the cut? My books. I was told a few years later, that THAT was the defining moment. When the man, who would later become my husband, knew he wanted to marry me.Â
A love of reading is often a reflection of education. And, that’s important…in a literal sense, I guess. But, there are numerous ‘educated’ souls whose Christian names leave behind a trail of letter detritus – CFP, CGA, CDAC, PHDFJELLYRPPFC. Yet, the last thing they absorbed was a 1976 waiting room-weary Reader’s Digest (‘Drama in Real Life’…apparently, everyone is saved…AGAIN!).
No, a passion for books speaks of something deeper. An intellectual curiousity. A desire to step outside our insular lives. An appreciation of ideas – likely morphing into future shared snorts and snickers at the sublime, the ridiculous, the ironic…or, a mutual “MY GOD, that rearranged my senses” shared, post-novel, literary cigarette. Or, best of all - debating – when it’s okay to disagree – to tell the person they’re WAY OFF. In fact, they’re so far off – they’re a bonehead. “You dufus,  that story was pathetically portrayed. Come ON, it took the author four frickin’ paragraphs to describe the sky!!”
Books matter.
They shape our lives…
…molding themselves into crevices, over curves, and SMACK into the hearts of like-minded lovers and friends.
Legs.
Indeed.
~