Peacework asked activists across the country to answer, "What work of poetry or fiction changed your life?" This is one of the answers. Please comment on our website [5] and describe how a particular work of literature has affected you.
Paul Lacey, professor emeritus of literature at Earlham College, is Clerk of the National Board of Directors of the American Friends Service Committee.
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The year I turned eighteen was the worst time of my life. Family life was unhappy, and there was little reason to believe I could ever afford to go to college. I began working in an office, hoping I could save enough to get a start on college a year later. For the first time in my life, I also had no classes or assignments, nothing to read except what I wanted.
I began reading desperately, unsystematically, without guidance, and until I found my job, I stayed up all night reading and listening to classical music on the radio. That is when I first read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. It is not a book to read alone, unsure about one's own future, and I had no inner resources to absorb the bleakness of those characters' lives, the terror of Raskolnikov's crime. I was utterly incapable of seeing the hope of spiritual redemption that Dostoevsky offers at the end. The book left me in despair, and my life seemed worthless.
Still reading unsystematically, I turned from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is still a puzzle why that book should have begun to pull me from despondency to hope. Certainly War and Peace also shows us reasons for despair, but the holy fools and innocents survive, neither achieving greatness nor losing their essential goodness. In Tolstoy's novels, life often signals its promise in the birth of babies.
I turned from Tolstoy's fiction to his educational, philosophical and theological essays. I was then becoming a Quaker and struggling hard with pacifism. Tolstoy helped me there, but luckily I never became a Tolstoyan. In his essays he too often says "it is so simple" about very complex questions.
But the energy of life, the beauty of the natural world, the solidity of people who can bear to live with their own and others' errors, the joy in caring for children -- all that caught me then and gave me the inner energy I needed for daily life. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy remain powerful emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual influences on me. I am grateful for both, but I am aware that books can not only help us to wisdom and personal redemption, but they can also devastate us.
Some can only safely be read in the company of others.