Big Pictures

Through the details unique to each story, literature shows us the big pictures in life. When I take in the stacks and stacks of shirts in Jay Gatsby’s closets, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and the pool that Gatsby had not been in all summer, I see how meaningless life can be for people who hang their hopes on something other than God. The near endless struggles of Frodo and Sam on their doomsday mission to Mordor reminds me that freedom and (assurances of) safety seldom go hand in hand. Anne Shirley’s stubborn clinging to her anger over an innocent, flirtatious remark about the color of her hair helps me to understand the dangers of pride.

Great characters, like people we have known deeply in our lives, become complex attractors that order and deepen daily understanding. Thinking through literature helps form judgment and right feeling—in fact, it helps us order experience itself, because the accuracy of depictions can be constantly tested against people we know or might come to know.                 —Glenn Arbery

I sometimes try to imagine where I would be without the influence of literature in my life, but it’s such an unpleasant state that I don’t dwell there often.