Mirror on Page

“And there’s one last reason I liked your book so much: some books you can read and read and rack your brains over, but they’re so cleverly written that you don’t seem to be able to understand them. In my case I’m dim-witted, I’m dim-witted by nature so I can’t read works which are too grand. But when you read this one, you feel as if you’d written it yourself - I felt as if I’d taken my own heart, for example, such as it is, and turned it inside out for people to see me, and described it all in detail - that’s the feeling I had! And it’s all so simple, goodness me, I’d written it like that myself!” 

“Poor Folk” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1846

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Dear Alex,

Christmas in its passing has slipped me a gift, leaflets of human frailty. The days are rare, only three left in the turn to the New Year, the pages more raw but familiar, 124 of them in the turning of a novella, the first written by Dostoyevsky.

I am starting my nightly reading of “Poor Folk”. I don’t know how I could have missed it in all my decades of poor living, much like missing Christmas when it’s gone. I first heard of this masterpiece in the prelude of another novel, though it was not listed in my required school reading, nowhere heard in history class, unrated on the shelves of local bookstores.

I panicked over its obscurity, searched for the title in my regional library website; none in hard copy. So my fingers toed across the phone screen, a dance towards Dostoyevsky, a century-plus late in coming but going still to online thrift books for sale. When days later a thin paperback in padded envelope leaned by my front door, I did not grasp the arrival of gold in prose and purpose until the first few words filtered through time to my senses.

Is this how we pause to squint at a vision of ourselves in the mirror of a book? Sketch your face along the profiles of made-up characters no less made up in your reality, the unzipping of your secrets and shouts on the lines of simple fonts in print. From sheet to film, acting to living, how do we leap across genres and generations to get up at dawn, giddy up for a reason to eat, snack after traffic, year to grave?

This is what happens when you long to be in love, tipping to the New Year, a leaf drifting as a stroke of word past your ear.

Yours, Kate