The First Book of Summer

I have always loved to read. As a child, I used to stay up late reading. Frequently my parents would see that my light was still on hours after I had supposedly gone to bed, and they would open my door and tell me it was time to sleep. I eventually began putting a blanket at the foot of the door to keep any light from escaping just so I could read as long as I wanted. I cannot accurately estimate the number of books I read as a child and adolescent, but the number would probably be quite high.

I have continued to read quite a bit (being an English major definitely required a lot of reading), but I was never able to find much time to read for fun, to read something that I wanted (not needed) to read. Now, as a college graduate taking a year off before starting graduate school, I finally have free time for reading, and that makes me very happy. Already, just over one week since school ended, I have started and completed two books. While I will likely write about both of these books, I'd like to focus on just one of them right now.

Brian Doyle is an author that I had never heard of before taking my Creative Nonfiction Writing class, taught by Pat Madden, this last semester. We read a lot of personal essays by a lot of different authors, but Doyle always stood out to me. That was likely due in part because he was one of Pat's favorite essayists and we read a lot of his essays as a class, but, more importantly, there is something in his writing, in the words he chooses and the way he puts them together into sentences, that effects me tremendously.

Brian Doyle is a believer. He believes in the worth of individual human beings, in his Catholic faith (with pure devotion), in prayer, in the ability of words to touch the human spirit, in the beauty of the small everyday events that make up our lives, and, more than anything else, in love and its redemptive power. His essays are infused with that love, and I felt that each essay increased my own ability and desire to love. I think it is impossible to read his work and not feel that love, to not be moved, often to the point of tears, as he describes his faith or his past or his experiences with his young children or his love for his wife or his love of humanity. And he does it in a way that is his alone, with short essays, long run-on sentences, and an utter lack of pretense and ego.

His collection of essays Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies is an incredible work of art. The short length of his essays lets the reader progress quickly through the six main sections. There are too many incredible sentences and powerful paragraphs to list. I found something in each essay that moved me profoundly. I highly recommend this book, and I have decided to include one of the essays that most impacted me.

It is titled "Leap."

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backward with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people "leaping as they flew out." John Carson saw six people fall, "falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting." Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, "too many people falling." Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, wrote Peter, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succint ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

There is no fear in love, wrote John, but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.

Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

Their passing away was thought an affliction / and their going forth from us, utter destruction, says the book of Wisdom. But they are in peace... They shall shine, / and shall dart about as sparks through stubble.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

I trust I shall shortly see thee, John wrote, and we shall speak face to face.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold on to that.