My dad and I are in many ways very different. Whenever Arsenal plays, I annihilate my nails with my teeth, can’t fully catch my breath, nervously hoping for a win. My dad couldn’t care less about sports. I love to make my bed in the morning, while my dad think it’s a big waste of time. I like birds, but my dad loves them. When we walk, he stops without warning, to listen to the little creatures, gaze at them, and identify them. Once we manage to resume our walking, he’ll muse on why European robins are cuter than American robins, or implore me to be as amazed as he is by the fact that birds are the modernpday descendants of dinosaurs, or drop some other tidbit of information I never knew he carried. One thing we have always shared, however, is our love for books. And this book I’m going to talk about today is a book I bought in one of those excursions with my dad. That day was a great day — first, journey to McNally Jackson, then a dimly-lit dinner at a Georgian restaurant, and finally, the grand reveal of each other’s hauls.
What drew me to Inland was the cover’s simplicity. A white background broken by printed black text. The author’s last name also struck me. Murnane. I embarrasingly caught my tongue over and over replacing the first “n” with an “m” — Murmane, no, no, ugh, try again. You might think that I pick my books more carefully. Often, cool covers and strange names are more than enough to win me over.
My favorite surface for reading isn’t benches or chairs but rather steps. When I wrap up work day, but I’m not quite ready to head on home, I’ll go to that spot I like on the steps of campus and read. This passage I’m sharing I must admit I’d forgotten, but I know I loved it because past me made sure that I could find my way back to it easily. Like most people, I dog-ear the top corners of a page to mark my place in the book. If a whole page jumps at me, so much so that underlining cannot suffice, then I dog-ear its bottom corner. When I picked the book back up after weeks of inactivity, and noticed the irregularity, I thought it was a page that had gotten bent in my backpack, likely while it was squeezed between my water bottle and work laptop. Once I noted the little triangle tucked in the bottom right corner, I recognized it for the marker that past me had left for me, and so I re-read the passage that I had at some point loved so much:
Do you suppose then, reader, having dreamed and read, that you have learned what I am?
Let me tell you, reader, what I consider you to be.
Your body — whether or not the belly of it protrudes or the hair on the head of it is turning grey, and whether the hand in front of the belly I writing or at rest or busy at something else — your body is the least part of you. Your body is a sign of you, perhaps: a sign marking the place where the true part of you begins.
The true part of you is far too far-reaching and much too many-layered for you or me, reader, to read about or to write about. A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page. […] And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all the places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about. Then, reader, you know as well as I know that when you have not been dreaming you have been looking at pages of books or standing in front of bookshelves and dreaming of yourself looking at pages of books. Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you. And by now, you suppose, the map must be almost filled with places.
I tried to remember why I’d loved the passage so much, and I think it’s because of the way Murnane captures the blessed mystery of the soul. True, our bodies mark our concrete existence, but our existence lies, as the book’s title suggests, inland. Our existence is too complex, too faceted, simply far too much to be explained in purely material terms.
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