Living Out Loud Read Online Free Page B

too long. And downstairs my bookshelves are filled with books.
    Strange things make me feel secure. I can’t honestly say how much money is in the savings account, and I still think of an I.R.A. as some black hole that I throw $2,000 into each year, like the mouth of some big carnivore at the zoo. ButI couldn’t get along without the cream pitcher shaped like a cat that my mother got as a shower gift, or the omelet pan that my Aunt Catherine gave me when I graduated from high school, or my books.
    I moved a fair amount when I was a kid. I wasn’t exactly an army brat, but I didn’t even come close to being married in the house where we lived when I was born. So I have a tendency to assemble all these talismans, wrap them in newspaper, and take them from place to place. The books were always most important because they were not simply objects, but portable friends. Sometimes at night I lie in the dark beneath my insulated crawl space and these words come to mind: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is the first sentence of
Pride and Prejudice
. It is the only sentence in any book in the English language I know perfectly by heart, except for the beginning of the Gospel of John, the part about, “In the beginning was the Word.”
    Pride and Prejudice
is not really my favorite book, although it is definitely in the top ten, along with
Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, Sons and Lovers, Anna Karenina, Gone With the Wind
and a series about two girls in Minnesota called the Betsy-Tacy books. But it is the book that makes me most feel that everything is going to be all right, that the world is a hospitable place and that, as Anne Frank once said, people are really good at heart.
    Why it should do this when it was published in 1813 and those feelings in the late twentieth century are so patently untrue, I do not know. Part of it is that
Pride and Prejudice
has been with me for a long time, since I was twelve. Part is that it is about a young woman named Elizabeth Bennet, who I have always felt would have been my best friend if she hadn’t been fictional. Part is that it is about the right things happeningin the wrong way—chance meetings leading to rapprochements, misunderstandings leading to marriages—in just the way you wish would happen in real life.
    Most important, I feel at home in this book. There is a great short story by Woody Allen called “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a college professor arranges for a conjurer to let him become a character in
Madame Bovary
and have a love affair with her. All over the world Flaubert scholars start wondering about this guy Kugelmass on page 94. I feel that I could just slip unnoticed into
Pride and Prejudice
. Elizabeth and I could sit around jawboning about what a pain Mr. Darcy is, while all the time I’d be secretly thinking he is just the guy for her.
    I never tire of Elizabeth Bennet or her family, even her silly mother. One summer my family moved to West Virginia—and, believe me, I was not West Virginia material. The Bennets saved my life. They moved with me, and I spent all my time with them until, finally, I made some friends. The only thing I don’t like about
Pride and Prejudice
is the ending, because then it’s over.
    I don’t feel this way about anything written much after 1940. I’ve always liked to hang around bookstores; among other things, I like the way they smell. But nowadays I stand in front of the fiction shelves and feel like a stranger in a strange land. I picture myself showing up in one of these books in which people sit around their kitchens and talk to their cats about what they bought at Bloomingdale’s, and I figure readers would just think, “Who’s that weird woman sitting over in the corner with the paperback copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, looking so sad?” I feel much the same way about objects, too, which is why I seem to buy so many