Refraction

It’s amazing how different the experience of reading a book can be at different times. This is most true of great books, but I suppose also happens with lesser ones. What was exciting the first time is boring the second, what was cute is trite. But a couple of decades can give you a whole different perspective on a book.

Universe Man is currently reading “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok. We tried him on it about a month ago and it didn’t take, but when I suggested it again, he started reading, and he has abandoned the much more conventionally exciting children’s fantasy book he was reading to devour this one. I’m not entirely certain why this book has captured an 8 ½ year old so completely, but I will ask him. After he finishes it.

I first read “The Chosen” when I was only a few years older than he is now. I might have re-read it in junior high or high school, but I certainly haven’t read it since then, so it occurred to me that maybe it was time to re-read, if only so that I could discuss it with Universe Man. (That is both one of the joys and burdens of a reader like Universe Man. I can discuss books with him and it is fabulous, but I spend an awful lot of time finding him books and reading them so that I can make sure the content is appropriate and so I can be ready to talk to him about them.)

What a difference a few decades and parenthood makes! When I first read “The Chosne,” it was my window into a piece of the world in which my mother grew up. Of course, she was born after the events in the book take place, and she didn’t grow up in quite that world, but that’s what my mother told me when she handed me the book those many years ago, and that’s what I got out of it.

What I took from it now is something completely different. It seems to me now that the book concerns itself with any number of questions, but most importantly with the dynamic of parents and children, and with how parents raise their children. Which is not an unimportant issue in my own life these days, and of course something I could not possibly comprehend when I was 10 or when I was in high school. The struggle to raise a brilliant child to be a moral human being looms enormous in my own life and I cannot recall ever having seen this struggle so clearly depicted as in this book. Actually, until I got to the end of the book, I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms at all, even as I feel my way through it.

I will be interested to find out what Universe Man thinks of the book when he’s done with it. I haven’t yet decided whether I will talk to him about the ways in which the book is so very different for me now than when I first read it. Probably not. I’ll just tell him that he should be sure to re-read it when he’s a parent himself.