The Power of Literature

Art is powerful!  All forms of art. Music, painting, poetry or prose, photography, theater, film, and so forth. They all possess the ability to attract or repel. Whether we appreciate the work that we have just seen, read, or heard, it has effected us in some manner; either positively or negatively. 

Art is also transformative. It can cause us to change or it can reinforce a change that has been made or is in the process of being made in our lives. It can cause us to transcend a present reality, if only for a moment, and enter a place where all is calm and all is right. Where there is peace.

In the case of literature, it will sometimes put into words something that we are not quite able to articulate for ourselves. It speaks to us and it speaks for us.

I am not sure when it was that I first read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence. I wish I did. Along with Of Human Bondage, this was one of the first works of Somerset Maugham’s that I read. Though I enjoyed the entire novel, it was a single paragraph found at the beginning of Chapter 50 that forever marked this work as being one of my favorites.

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”

These words illustrate a feeling that I felt following my first trip to England. While time has dimmed my memory of that trip somewhat, I do recall once taking a walk along some side streets of Camden Town. I had turned a corner while returning from a bank. At that moment I felt as though this was were I was meant to be. Not specifically in that area of the city or even on that particular street, but in this country, this part of the world. As the passage reads, I was sensing “a nostalgia for a home” that I knew not. I had hit upon a place where I felt I belonged. 

What caused this I do not know. It might have been that my ancestors came from the British Isles. It might have been a deep appreciation for English Literature and British History. It might have been admiration of a centuries old culture. Whatever it was, I felt that I was in the place where I would live a portion of my life.

I remember telling someone on the flight home that I would be back in six months. But as things happen, life occurs and sometimes our hopes and dreams dim in the harsh light of reality. Dim, but not burn out. It took twenty years, but I did return to England. Once for a holiday with my wife. Then again when we moved to Warwickshire.

Perhaps we all carry a sense of longing within us; that desire to be in that place where we know we belong. It may not be to live in a foreign land, but it is there. It is that something that draws us further down the street and makes us turn the next corner. Around that corner is excitement and adventure. Around that corner is fulfillment, But too, there is peace that may be found. It is a peace that comes from knowing that you at last have found rest.

There is power in literature. It can express for us what we have longed to express and in doing so, it becomes a part of who we are.

Greg