In Search of Enchantment, Bookish and Otherwise

When headlines shock and disenchant, it's time to write in a community

You wouldn’t expect a happy ending after a wreck like this, but Shakespeare and Ariel work it out in The Tempest.

What’s with July 2024? It’s feeling like Act III in a Shakespearean drama, building to something.

You probably don’t need a review.¹

The world is going to heck - right? - and some crackpot named

Tara Penry

wants to know when we were enchanted by a book. Oh, please. Who has time - or heart - for sweet prose murmurs or poetic sorcery when the world is going kablooey?

Oh, by the way, school starts in a month. Move over summer pandemonium, there’s work to do.

My brave oenothera blooms right through it. She doesn’t even mind the smoke that blew up here from California last week and stayed.

.

Unless you’re a pollinator, what good is enchantment in times like these? Is it escapist to bury oneself in a book?

Imagine Caliban urging Stephano to kill Prospero and take Miranda for a wife, and Stephano putting up a hand: “Uh-uh, not now, Caliban. I’m halfway through

Evelyn Skye

’s The Hundred Loves of Juliet. I’m not listening.”

Crazy. Who reads for fun in Act III?

.

You tell me: Who reads for enchantment in times like these?

And what are you reading, rereading, or remembering? Is it an escape hatch, a buoy, a choral conductor raising her baton? What is an enchanting book to you?

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I had a moment of enchantment last evening, waiting in the car in the hot dusk, when my son stepped out of the building where I was picking him up. He walked toward me in short sleeves. A light desert breeze blew the fabric that hung over his slender arm. It flapped and flapped as he approached. Through the car windows, all rolled down, came the same desert breeze, cooler than the day, and welcome.

.

My writing this week is an empty sleeve, flapping in the hot, swift current of the news. I can hardly keep up with the gusts. I write and stop: Hush, too hot. Write and stop. Write and stop.

.

We read to put present circumstances in another light.

We read to clear the smoky air.

We read the way a fly fisherman casts a long line with hope that something unseen and unassured bites.

We read to hear a fine, clear voice singing steadily through the jostle and crash. We follow it, the way shipwrecked sailors follow Ariel in The Tempest.

We read when we are ready to be called back into the community we understand.

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To en-chant: to sing into, sing over, to cast a spell.

The world is fractured because we have chosen different spell casters. There is nothing new in this.

We may not be able to break each other’s enchantments, but we can still choose our own.

.

So whose words do you allow to sing to you?

When were you enchanted by a book?

How does that relationship to language or story strengthen you when you need strength?

Yes, Act III is as good a time as any to read and write of the music that moves us.

Join the community writing challenge between now and July 26th.

Until then, I’ll be playing games with the kids when they’ll tolerate it, or (I hope!) catching up on scrumptious serials here on Substack by

Eleanor Anstruther

,

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

,

Adam Nathan

,

Ben Wakeman

, and

Claudia Befu

.

Writing this week feels like speaking in a desert with a parched throat. Other weeks will have more humidity. Time to burrow in and read.

The next time a crackpot like

Tara Penry

asks when you were enchanted by a book, picture yourself shipwrecked and shaken on an island. You hear voices. Which one do you follow? Why?

Remember to tag me (@TaraPenry) when you post.

Peace, friends, wherever you find it.

Tara

1. In case you do:

July 1 - The U.S. Supreme Court extended legal immunity to presidents for “official” acts.

July 7 - The Toronto Star published Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of abuse almost fifty years ago by her stepfather, the second husband of Nobel Laureate Alice Munro.

July 13 - A shooter narrowly missed killing Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, instead killing a man in the audience and wounding two others. Secret Service snipers killed the 20-year-old alleged shooter.

July 13 - Two Munro siblings published stories supporting their sister Andrea Skinner. (Sister, stepbrother - Articles are mostly paywalled, but You Tube commentary from CBC is not.)

July 15 - A Trump-appointed federal judge dismissed a serious case against Trump for mishandling classified documents.

And this is all regardless of what you think of J.D. Vance as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

In the western U.S., wildfires are filling the air with smoke. Temperatures in many places have topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Claudia Befu

says Central Europe is even hotter.

“Shantih shantih shantih,” ends T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: Peace, peace, peace.