A novel is journey; a novel is liberty

Susan Sontag wrote in At The Same Time:

A novel is not a set of proposals, or a list, or a collection of agendas, or an (open-ended, revisable) itinerary. It is the journey itself — made, experienced, and completed.

I’ve been reading novels for fifty years. At a rate, on average of one a week. That’s a lot of novels. Let’s call it 2,600 of them, give or take. Some I’ve read twice or more. Many are books that were forgotten almost as soon I put them down for the last time. But enough were of sufficient quality that they changed me in some way.

I learned that reading a masterfully written novel is akin to the type of cannibalism where it is believed the strengths and experiences of the devoured become one with the soul of the devourer.

I certainly devoured books. And, through those books, I learned to relate to the world. I learned about politics and sex and love and religion and spirituality. I traveled to foreign countries — and learned of their alien traditions and habits — before I landed there physically. The past was revealed to me.

My reading made me in ways that my formal education did not and certainly in ways that my parental influence could not.

In that same essay, Sontag also writes:

Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death.

The novel allows us to live countless lives. I know Sontag means something more subtle but reading a great book makes us, in the end, a great bargain for the Grim Reaper; slay one, get hundreds thrown in.

But with novels to read — and read again — we die free.