Every Reader is a Facet of a Text

In her beautiful and compelling memoir Speaking of Faith, radio host Krista Tippett makes the following observation about reading sacred texts like the Bible: if you sit with the stories, "pick over them, retell them, they begin to grow--take on nuance and possibility before your eyes. One layer of meaning is lifted and another reveals itself. You sense that the text would respond to every conceivable question....The only limitation is my time, my powers of imaginative concentration, and my capacity to listen to the interpretations of others."

It seems to me this is true for texts generally--even of letters or conversations or rumors. If a text is a mysterious gem, then every reader is a facet of that gem. We make it new by making it our own. To enter into a conversation about text--any text--is to admit the possibilities and to accept that there are possibilities even beyond our imagination. It is to see something new every time because texts, like life itself, are dynamic.

Not so long ago I had the experience of watching a story take on nuance and possibility as listeners picked over and retold a text. I read a passage from my book Silent Spaces to a small group of writers in Goshen, Connecticut. Silent Spaces weaves together family texts--letters, notes, journal entries--and poems based on my encounters with the texts; their authors; and their curators, my family. The passage was the letter from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to my great-grandparents affirming the death of their son Laurence Isbell in combat with the Japanese while serving on a submarine in World War II.

For years the letter had seemed to me to be harsh and final smack upside the head. In it Forrestal describes in clinical detail the last movements of my uncle's boat, the USS Herring: "A few hours after the BARB and the HERRING parted company, the BARB picked up sounds of distant depth charge explosions, indicating that the HERRING was involved in an attack. Several hours later, the BARB rescued a survivor from an enemy escort vessel which had apparently been sunk by the HERRING. On 3 June 1944, messages were sent to the HERRING and the BARB, and both ships were ordered to acknowledge these messages within three days. No acknowledgement was ever received from the HERRING....She [failed] to return to Midway Island, and no message or other communication was ever received from her. In view of the length of time that has now elapsed since your son was reported to be missing and because there have been no official nor unconfirmed reports that any of the personnel of the vessel survived or were taken prisoner of war, I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that your son is deceased."

The response to these words of the men and women who were on average in their 70s was quite unlike my own. They were impressed by Forrestal's candor. They felt the Secretary of the Navy sought to provide my great-grandparents with as much information as possible so that they could find some peace and an end to the story. Indeed, they found it to be intimate, personal, loving.

Not until that moment had I seen that letter that way. I had simply introduced the passage as what it was; I gave no indication of how I had read it myself. Here was a roomful of people gathered around a single text and bringing their own stories and recollections of that time in history to this letter. They opened for me a new way of seeing this text and of feeling better about it.

I still think of that letter as a blow to the heart. I also see it as a gesture of compassion.

The same thing on a lighter note:
“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” (W. Somerset Maugham)