everyone should do this

When I was in high school, my English teacher recommended that we all read The Great Gatsby once every decade of our lives. She said that it spoke to you each time, but in entirely different ways, and it was amazing to her to see how differently she responded to it at age 30 as opposed to age 20. I never particularly planned to follow the advice, seeing as how I hated The Great Gatsby. (Is that like heresy for an English major to say? I can defend my position if I'm ever asked to.)

However, I have now followed her advice completely unintentionally--well, almost. My book is not The Great Gatsby. It is called Stepping Heavenward, written in the 1860s by a Mrs. E. Prentiss, and it is a novel-written-as-a-journal, the spiritual autobiography of a young woman from the age of 16 until death. I read it once when I was in middle school with my best friend Katie (who I think loved it mostly because the narrator's name is "Kate"); once the year after high school when I was living overseas, because my aunt sent it to me in a care package; and I just noticed it on my bookshelf and picked it up to begin reading again, since it's a fairly quick read and I was looking for a short book to hold me over until school starts. It only occurred to me afterwards that I read it at two other "significant" points in my life--the start of adolescence (and all the insane questioning going along with that) and my first year living on my own. I am going ahead and counting this as another "significant" point in my life since it is the start of my last year at college, and I am definitely feeling a great deal of questions coming on.

The more I have read, the more I have remembered of how I felt about the book and what I related to the previous times I read it. The first time, I remember I was mostly excited at the narrator's vivacity and outspokenness, since I have always been probably a little too loud. And I think I was excited that she was a girl--I'd like to argue that not enough serious books (ie not Babysitter's Club) are written with women as the main characters. I also related to all of her initial questioning about what it meant to love God, what it meant to be good, and why all of that was so hard. I do clearly remember, however, that by the end of the book, I was completely terrified of this "mature" narrator who I thought I could never relate to as she dealt with issues of life, death, sacrifice of personal dreams, and hope in the midst of all that with such peace and grace. I think it only undid my initial comfort that "someone else" related to all of my confusions and questions, since I was still stuck in them and the narrator was meanwhile growing out of them at a speed of about 10 years/hour.

The second time I read it, I was more amused by 16-year-old Kate, and less frightened by 40-year-old Kate (although still equally bewildered at how she got to where she was so quickly). On this reading, I will at least say that while I am still amazed by and desirous of the older narrator's maturity, I've found myself not quite as depressed to discover that I am not there yet. This, I believe, is progress. It helps, of course, that I feel more advanced in all of my questions than my middle-school-self felt; it is delightful to realize that even though there are days when I feel like I am right back in 8th grade, growth has been occurring even without my feeling it all the time, and thus I can hope to continue to grow. I hope someday to be able to live with the grace that is described by the older Kate. But it is also freeing to recognize that I am where I am, and I do not have to be perfected yet--God has brought me here, and will continue to work in me, but is being patient and so very loving toward me in the meantime.

Obviously, it's fairly easy to draw parallels to your own life and growth when you're reading a book about an entire life and growth throughout that life. It also helps me in particular that this is a spiritual autobiography. But my guess--because my English teacher said so and she seemed to be right about a lot of things--is that it would work with any really good piece of fiction. Just feeling how you relate to the characters and themes at different stages, I would imagine, could speak volumes about how you are relating to yourself and the world around you at the same stages. I used to almost feel guilty about re-reading any book regularly, since there are so many books in the world to be read and I will, sadly, never get to all of them. But I think I may have to make this a habit with a few special books, now that I have stumbled across it. And I think you should too.