BOOKS TO LIVE BY: THE HISTORY OF LOVE

Outside there is green coming up from the ground and red buds unfurling from once bare branches. I am inside writing an essay about umbrellas and music and places I have been. It makes me glad to research things but more glad to remember things. Like New Oxford Street, a little east of Bloomsbury Square, where there is the bookstore that I went to one day because I was sad and everywhere there was fog and rain. I had no umbrella. I went into that bookstore, found a comfy chair, and opened the first book I found. This is what I read:

Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma! you shouted. Come back! Come back!

But she didn't.

And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

For a long time, it remained hollow.Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

I cried reading that. It was so beautiful and true. So now I am rereading this passage to friends and thinking about how much of my life has been touched by this single excerpt. I read Nicole Krauss' The History of Love back to back with Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and it was the beginning of everything for me. I saw anew what language can do, what joy and sadness and beauty it can express. And I wanted to read everything and write even more. It is good to remember these moments. Four years ago I knew so little about what I wanted or needed in life. I know probably less now, but I don't mind. I have the love and company of good people, the love for good people, and this is more than good.