The Giver

I just finished rereading The Giver and I'm having that experience of being so sad the book has ended - of agonizing over the character's choices. I have to keep reminding myself that the story isn't real, that the characters are okay because they aren't real. But, it is real, so powerfully real. Books can give to us wisdom that cannot be gleaned otherwise... as one of my favorite authors, Marlene Nourbese Philip, once said "Fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the life – the artifice of the form to tell those truths.”



I read The Giver when I was in grade school, and even then I knew how striking and profound it was. But, reading it again as an adult, I see so many more layers. This book is an important one. It's about how meaning is created in life. The novel demonstrates the need for emotions, for pain, for love, for mistakes and for beautify to create a purposeful life. By taking these things away from everyday life in the setting of her book, Lois Lowry shows us just how vital they truly are...how empty, albeit secure and calm, life would become without them. And, the book is so much deeper than even this if you allow it to be. It brings to question what else could be missing from the life we as a society have structured for ourselves...what we've made imperceptible through boundaries, definitions and etiquette meant to make life simpler, better, navigable. I think we all have a bit of "the ability to see beyond" as Lowry calls it, and, when we are open, we get glimpses of things we can't explain - things unknown but somehow known at the same time - things we've forgotten but can remember.


So, I'm going to bed with my mind swirling with an appreciation and wonder for life.


Thank you literature for existing! I'm so glad I'm reading again. I've missed it.