Nicola Morris started off British, but now lives in Vermont, and is an expert on, among other things, the golem as a figure for post-Holocaust humanity.  Nicky is the co-editor of Alchemy of the Word, and her contribution, excerpted here, speaks of the power of books to save lives and change lives, even through chance encounters.  It is a recurring theme in our conversations about the writing life, full of indelible personal stories like this one.  Nicky writes:

The poet Bruce Weigl writes, “even after I started bringing books home from school, it never occurred to me that they were things I actually had to hold in my hands for very long... I’d never seen anyone read a book in my house, or in the houses of my grandparents. Books were what they gave you at school for homework.”  His mother saw dangers in books:  “Reading some things in books could hurt you." The knowing could be dangerous because there were questions you were not supposed to ask; things that were better left unknown or unsaid.

In high school Bruce Weigl dreamed and made up stories and then enlisted in the army.  He was seventeen. It was 1968.  In his memoir, The Circle of Hanh, he describes a time while he lay ill in base camp in Vietnam when a man from the Red Cross threw a book at him and said, “Read this, boy.”   Weigl writes, “Something snapped into place in my brain...I don’t know why the words made sense to me then: 1968, the war raging all around us, the air filled with screams...That book was my link to another world, my bridge to a space blown wide open with a light that filled my brain.”  He writes, “I was not headed in the direction of books, but there was a moment while I reread and reread Crime and Punishment that morning, my stomach raw from bad water, my nerves blown out, my life on a wire, when I must have glimpsed the enormous possibilities of expression because I remember that I was jarred from one way of thinking to another.”

The person who threw a book at me was a steelworker in Bristol, England. It was 1970, I had just had a baby and the baby had died. I was living with my husband in a trailer, terrified of having another baby, with nothing to say to my husband. Every night I dreamed I was drowning. I tried to swim to shore but couldn’t reach it however hard I pushed my arms in the water or kicked my legs.  The dreams infused my days.  I worried I was going to die, as, a few weeks earlier, in labor without knowing how babies are born, I’d believed I was dying.   The steel worker lived in a bedsitter in a converted Victorian house. His bed was under the window, opposite a fireplace, and he had a hot plate in a corner for boiling water for tea.  I was always hungry then, desperate for food and hot drinks. I remember curling in an armchair in front of his fireplace one evening drinking tea, and trying not to eat all of the biscuits in his tin.   I told him my dream.   I was not a trusting person, but my dream terrorized me. I didn’t know anyone who talked about dreams.  He didn’t try to analyze it, didn’t produce words of wisdom. Instead he handed me a book: Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  From it I learned there was a world within the surface of the world, that everything was not what it seemed, and, most importantly, perhaps, for me at that particular moment, that it was okay to dream you were almost drowning; the danger was if you dreamed you actually drowned.  I didn’t drown. I also didn’t become a Jungian analyst, but I did begin to understand that although I was seventeen, and, within a few weeks, pregnant again, I had wisdom I could draw on.

From that steelworker whose name I’ve forgotten, I learned I could turn to books, to thinkers, to stories, to dreams, just as Bruce Weigl learned from the Red Cross man that a Russian writing years before could have something to say about the hell he lived in.  We both learned to think in new ways.

I learned how to live: thinking, writing, dreaming, thinking, some talking, and, finally, writing, writing, writing.

Nicola Morris is the co-editor of Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk about Writing and the author of The Golem as Metaphor in Jewish American Literature. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in anthologies and in print and web-based literary journals. In addition to teaching in Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing program, she teaches in the English Department at SUNY Cortland.

This essay is excerpted from "Throwing the Book," published in the anthology The Alchemy of the Word, California Institute of Arts and Letters, Coimbra Editions.  For more information on the book and this series, The Daily Mentor, check out my introductory post here.