Six Books in a Tent

A pack has room for very few books, so the ones that come down into a valley like this are chosen the way you choose a companion for a long walk — not for brilliance, but for whether you can bear their company in the rain. These six came with me. I read them by a head torch with the batteries going, which is the right light for most of them.

Shi Tiesheng — The Temple of Earth and Me

我与地坛essay1991

At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng lost the use of his legs. For years afterwards he wheeled himself almost every day into an old, half-abandoned park in Beijing, the Temple of Earth, and sat among its cypresses and broken walls deciding whether to go on living, and how. The essay holds those afternoons: the light moving over old stone, the strangers who came and went across the years, and his mother, who came looking for him again and again without ever letting him see how afraid she was. Nothing in it is hurried. The question is not so much answered as lived beside, until it changes shape.

For the night I needed someone who had sat with the hardest question for a long time, in a quiet place, and had not been destroyed by it.

William Styron — Darkness Visible

memoir1990

A short, exact book about the depression that overtook the novelist in his sixties. Styron distrusted the word depression itself — too mild, he thought; a word for a dip in the economy, not a storm in the mind. What I valued was the exactness. He describes the thing without flinching and without performing it, and insists, plainly, that it is an illness and not a failure of will, and that people come through it.

For the night I needed it described correctly, so that I could stop wondering whether I was imagining it.

Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters to a Young Poet

letterswritten 1903–1908 · published 1929

Ten letters to a young man who had written asking for advice and received, instead, a way of standing in the world. Rilke wanders through solitude and patience and work. What stays is how he treats sadness: not as something to be hurried out of the house, but as a guest who may be quietly rearranging the rooms while it stays.

For the night I wanted sadness taken seriously, as part of a life rather than a fault in it.

W. G. Sebald — The Rings of Saturn

prose fiction1995

In August 1992 a narrator very like Sebald sets out to walk the coast of Suffolk, and a year later finds himself in hospital, almost unable to move. Between those two facts lies the book: a long walk through shingle and ruined estates, through herring and silk and the wreckage of empires, told in sentences that go on like a coastline. Nothing is consoled. But the walking itself becomes a kind of shelter, and I read it the way one walker reads another.

For the nights I could not stop thinking, and wanted company in thinking that did not ask me to arrive anywhere.

Andrew Solomon — The Noonday Demon

non-fiction2001

An enormous, generous book — memoir, science, history, and reporting from people living with depression across the world. Its subtitle calls it An Atlas of Depression, and it reads like one. You need not go from front to back. You open it to the region you are in.

For a steadier night, when I could bear a long book and wanted to see the whole map at once.

Yu Hua — To Live

活着novel1993

An old farmer, Fugui, tells the story of his life to a young man who is collecting folk songs, and it is a life in which nearly everything is taken from him, one person at a time. It sounds unbearable. Somehow it is not. The novel does not argue for hope, or explain why any of it happens. It just keeps going beside a man who keeps going, and at the end he is still there, in a field, talking to an old ox.

For the night I had had enough of books that tell you why, and wanted one that simply continued.

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Books can keep you company, but they cannot pick up a phone at three in the morning. If what you need tonight is a voice rather than a page, the lantern is lit.