The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

42 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 setbacks that is only now beginning to see some small progress. In order to really describe this process, I’ll have to turn back the pages of time to my youth, when I learned to love to read. My enjoyment of reading is central to my desire to write. After all, why would I want to create something that I couldn’t enjoy? Fortunately, I revel in a well-written book; the act of reading it is so much more complex and subtle than watching even the most expertly executed film. The use of language, layers of meaning, and vivid descriptions reveal things about the characters, the setting, and even the author that an image on a screen never could display. However, given other circumstances, I might never have learned that love. My life through the end of high school could be described as “isolated” in the truest sense of the word. I was separated from the nearest other children my age by miles of rural countryside, with no reliable contact with others beyond my own family and no television, cell-phone, or other easy access to the outside world. Some might consider this a dull and unenviable way to grow up; I don’t. This isolation defined me, shaping me into the person I am today. Without it, I most likely would have missed out on three surpassingly amazing friends who shared a house and a childhood with me. Besides, I might have been cut off from more typical and modern forms of entertainment, but I had access to a vast library of black ink on white and yellowing paper. Though the library I mention could likely compete with many smaller real libraries in number of books, it is not actually a library but rather a farmhouse; I refer to the home where I grew up. Picture for a moment a large, white house in the middle of the cornfields of central Illinois. The house has grown over the years, much as the crumbling palaces of ancient kings once did; parts of it are well over a century old, while other parts have stood for less than a decade. I could go on for hours about the cool shade of the maple and apple trees, the gardens abloom with blazes of hue, the dim, musty old barn and its empty loft, the aroma and flavor of fresh-baked cookies in our grandmother’s kitchen next door, the dappled sunlight and birdsong falling warmly through the branches of the trees and entering my window, and the sleepy scent of the illuminated dust motes floating by the windows on quiet afternoons, but none of that is truly relevant at the moment. What matters are the books; our