In Which It Strikes Us As A Brash Move

This is the sixth in a series.

A Mirror

by LILY GOODSPEED

I must have read the first chapter of The Golden Compass at least ten times before I graduated elementary school. The premise was appealing: an alternate universe where humans held half their souls in animal companions called daemons, where the type of animal mirrored the personality traits of its owner. But getting through that first chapter was tough.

Lyra Belacqua spends most of the time hidden in a closet with her daemon Pan listening to stuffy old men discuss mysterious Northern phenomena. I remember one of my first attempts at reading this chapter particularly well. I was on an American Airlines flight to Florida to visit my grandma and I purposefully brought along the chunky paperback, convinced that a three-hour plane ride was the push I needed towards Lyra’s adventures. I promptly fell asleep on my brother’s shoulder.

Eventually I struggled through the slightly superfluous Golden Compass and scrambled through the much darker and more interesting books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Even at eleven, I knew that these books were taking on some heavy stuff. In the first book, kids are killed, or at least zombie-ified. In the second, teenagers are stalked by soul-sucking monsters invisible to their pre-adolescent counterparts.

The third ups the ultimate ante, with Lyra and her friend Will traveling directly into to the land of the dead, and Lyra’s parents basically murdering God. I could tell that framing the Catholic Church as the world’s primary source of villainy was a brash move by Philip Pullman, even if I didn’t know much about God with a capital “G,” since I was raised in the religious vacuum that is Reform Judaism.

I was perhaps the only kid in existence who read His Dark Materials and felt more religious afterwards, or at least more spiritual. The phrase I have used since childhood for my faith, or lack thereof, is “culturally Jewish.” At Hebrew school, I spent more time in “Meditation” class listening to songs from the Garden State soundtrack with a chilled-out Wesleyan grad than I did discussing any metaphysical topics.

The Goodspeed family worshipped knowledge more than anything. My mother brought my siblings and I to every children’s’ museum in the Tri-County area, evidenced by the number of stories I can tell about losing my brother between exhibit rooms. (One time Sam got lost at the aquarium and casually joined a new family to view the seal room.) My dad bought me a rock tumbler for my eighth birthday.

My third grade notebooks are filled not only with the names of crushes, but also the names of my favorite birds of prey from most to least deadly. I knew a lot about dinosaurs and volcanoes but not much about souls and sin.

Pullman’s books were both puzzling and exciting to me. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, for all its rants against organized religion, the two protagonists save the world through some approximation of love, not strength or cleverness. Even the daemon element made me think about my soul in ways I hadn’t. What would my daemon’s form settle into? In a lot of ways, the His Dark Materials trilogy was a perfect bridge between my own love of learning and bigger and deeper questions I felt less comfortable answering.

Pullman advocates a kind of humanist spirituality while simultaneously extolling the importance of science and discovery. So says the scientist Mary Malone in The Amber Spyglass: “I stopped believing that there was a power of good and evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not what they are." It’s dialectic, not diametric. You don’t have to choose one or the other. The line between religion and science is fuzzy, perhaps even non-existent.

For instance, the empirical and rational field of physics on Earth is called "experimental theology" in Lyra’s universe. Physicists study dark matter, and experimental theologians study “Dust”. They are different, but the same. This was a revelation for an atheist kid obsessed with Animorphs and Bill Nye living in the suburbs of New York City. Maybe religion didn’t have to be this God with a capital “G” or the boring parts of Hebrew school. Maybe religion could have something to do with which bird of prey my daemon would be.

Lily Goodspeed is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Prometheus.

"Strange Man" - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)

"Long Progression" - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)

In Which We Traverse The Spectral Plane

This is the second in a series. You can find the first part here.

The Arrival

by JANE HU

Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it; innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

– The Quiet American

No one reads as voraciously, as indiscriminatingly, as generously as the young reader. They trample through books as they do through life, incautious and reckless. Young readers burn through serials, absorbing whatever comes across their way. The young are notoriously promiscuous, if unwittingly so. They inhale books, they devour them. There is no premeditation on whether what is read offers nutrients or sustenance — and if they encounter a text that does, they could still hardly begin to dissect how. I know this because I was once a young reader, though I’ve rather lost the talent for such narrative greed.

I had a lot of favorite books. To Kill a Mockingbird was the best book ever. East of Eden was the best book ever. Pride and Prejudice was the best book ever. The Fountainhead was the best book ever. The only book at home left unfinished was Robinson Crusoe, because I wasn’t a very clever young reader. I tore through the YA section that promised consistency through seriality: the Boxcar Children, Little House on the Prairie, the Narnia chronicles, a lot of R. L. Stine. Often I’d take books from racks that boasted shiny badges on their covers, guessing that the only difference between Ernest Hemingway and Kit Pearson were the sections they emerged from. See, they were both so effortless to read.

When did that oxymoronic Young Adult label come into categorical being? I remember beginning to notice how some titles were appended after a colon with: “A Novel.” The addendum cut a line to tell me all books are created equal, but some books are more equal than others. Oh whether Kansas or Eden, I wasn’t in it anymore, for novel-land smacked of pretention. A Novel sounds fleshed out and significant! A novel knows what it is. See? It’s telling you right on the cover.

As a slippery genre, these texts often feel as unsettled and uncertain as the readers that cathect to them. Coming of age narratives mean that, at the end, you’re still in the process of arriving. I don't know what coming of age really means — the phrase so vaguely significant that it feels almost embarrassed of its overwhelming implications. Perhaps because sex was something I neither knew of nor understood, though, whatever fiction I read as a girl could only cement my impulse toward romance.

In grad school, I read novels seemingly primed for the young reader — Austen, Dickens, Trollope’s serials. Moving through them now, however, involves a different type of vigorous attention. I take notes while reading Bleak House. With Austen’s and Trollope’s heroine, I wonder—over and over—at what point can you forgive her?

Ahem. Walk Two Moons is firmly told from the perspective of a thirteen year old girl, though, so I suspect my love for Gramps is tied to my love for her. Sal drives with her grandparents from Ohio to Idaho, looking for her mother who never came home. The book is a coming of age story that takes the trope of the road narrative to track the burgeoning independence of its female heroine.

That’s summarily what Walk Two Moons is, but what makes it my dearest categorically “Young Adult” text is how I can’t lose the sense of what Sharon Creech’s book was. It was the first book that made me cry, which was up to then a thing I didn’t know words could do. The line that did it:

“It’s okay,” I said. I sat down on the other side of the bed and held his hand. “This ain’t your marriage bed.”

About five minutes later, Gramps cleared his throat and said, “But it will have to do.”

I can only conjecture why my identification went immediately to an elderly man who had just lost his wife. Was I so motivated to look for romance that weeping pathos could be my only and immediate response to everything? Erotic narcissism seemed much less naïve — much less a selfish young person’s  — than over-active bad empathy. If one grows up with their characters, than Gramps had let me overstep the processes of falling in love, having sex, having children, and landed me right in that overwhelming place where a full and lived life crystallizes upon the realization of its principle element. It promised that there would still be so much to lose.

If I read Creech’s book now for the first time, would I know sooner than Sal that her mother couldn’t return because of her own car accident? Could I gently let Sal know that her hypothesis of Mrs. Cadaver hiding dead bodies was a displacement of what Sal already knew?

Or would I still be like Sal, detached and hurt in my still-dreaming head because I had only known a world that wished to keep me safe. For all the pleasures afforded to the young reader, losing innocence and leaving Kansas (or Idaho) means escaping a world that has no future because it has always existed as an impossible past. Sal tells herself near the end of the book: “In the course of a lifetime, there were some things that mattered.” The sentence, in all its philosophical aspiration, says very little in itself, but so much about Sal. Her statement about a lifetime focuses on what has been even as Sal remains uncertain about what the anticipated subject — the thing “that mattered” — will be.

Jane Hu is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She twitters here, and you can find more of her writing here. She last wrote in these pages about leaving New York.

"Our Forever Is Now" - The River Has Many Voices (mp3)

"The Changes" - The River Has Many Voices (mp3)