The Power to Read, The Power to Imagine

"I love this book! I love this book! I love this book!"

Those were the words coming from Madison this past Thursday during independent reading time. A few weeks ago we were at the library and she asked me if I could recommend any books that might make her cry.

"Make you cry?" I asked.

"Yeah," she answered. "My mom and I really like to read books that make us cry."

This should have been an easy task because there are a whole host of books that are sad or touching in some way. Certainly, there are more than enough that can bring you to tears. But, as always seems to happen to me when put on the spot, I drew a blank. So Madison and I walked up and down the isles browsing book after book.

"Ahhhh!" I exclaimed. "This is the book for you!"

She looked the cover over.

"See there," I said. "The girl on the cover even looks like you."

And she did. Right there on the cover of Love, Ruby Lavender was an irresistible red-headed girl covered in freckles.

"Will it make me cry?" she asked.

"I think it might,' I answered. "There is an emotional ending. But the thing is that different books make different people cry for different reasons. What might make me cry might not make you do the same. You'll just have to read it to find out."

So here we were all spread out in the floor with our books two weeks later. Love, Ruby Lavender, while absolutely wonderful, is not an easy book for a second grade reader. For two weeks Madison had slowly made her way through page after page. And while parts of the book were hard for her she persevered well enough to completely fall in love with the characters. After two weeks she was down to her last few pages and although there were no tears for her in this particular story she was sad to finish it and say goodbye to all those characters who had become her friends.

Just twenty minutes earlier I had finished reading the final chapters of our class novel, Ruby Holler. At three hundred ten pages, this was by far the longest book I had read all year. It is the story of two orphans, Florida and Dallas, who are as behaviorally challenged as children can be. As a result of their terrible lives, they trust no one and respect no one.And as much as I love this book I feared even starting it. I was afraid it would stretch out across weeks and weeks and that the kids might lose interest or that we might not finish it before the end of school. Yet here we were wrapping it up only twelve or thirteen days after starting it. I had been reading twenty or thirty pages each day and still the kids groaned and complained when I stopped to put the bookmark back in.

"One more chapter," they'd beg. "Please!"

Sometimes the pleading worked and other times it didn't. Regardless, how wonderful it is to be a part of a school where we can fall in love with a book and devote twenty-five or thirty minutes a day to reading it without my having to worry about defending this use of class time. Many other schools would ask that I explain to them what state standards I'm addressing. What are the learning outcomes for your students? they would ask. I know because I've heard these questions before.

And perhaps it is a fair question. There are a lot of things to teach and guide kids into discovering for themselves over the course of a day, week, and year. Often times it will seem like there just isn't enough time to accomplish all that I would like to get to with my class. So then...why read aloud? What are they learning.

They're learning to love books. And love stories. And love language. But perhaps most of all they are learning to imagine.

This past week I was reading through JK Rowling's commencement speech to the 2008 graduates of Harvard University. Someone had sent this along to me a year or two ago and I enjoy revisiting it from time to time. I don't know that I had ever realized that Rowling, the wildly popular author of the Harry Potter series, was so amazing and brilliant until I read these words. I'd love to pass just a few of them along. In these excerpts she sums up the crucial importance of imagination.

...Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have not shared.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. 

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. 

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. 

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. 

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing. 

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I'd love to believe that these very thoughts had been in my head all these years. I'd like to say that this is the very reason I devoted so much time to sharing books and imagining other people and other worlds. But it wasn't. I did it only because it seemed logical. And it was fun. How nice it is, now, to have someone so articulate and thoughtful and brilliant come along and offer such sound reasons for spending time each day imagining.