Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” Thornton Wilder said, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

And Dorothy, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz , said, “Never give up…. No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”

“If you look for truth,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair.”

I found what I was looking for,

what I needed,

what I wanted,

what I loved

in books

when I couldn’t find it anywhere else.

Francie and the public library and books saved my life.

And taught me the most important lesson books have to teach.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin says, “but then you read. It was[books that] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

And the narrator in the movie Matilda says it even better:

“Matilda read all kinds of books and was nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships onto the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: ‘You are not alone.’”

I told you about falling in love with books

that day I got my library card,

that day I opened Have Space Suit and read that first page,

that day I discovered the Year’s Best collections,

but it wasn’t just that I fell in love with books,

with science fiction.

It wasn’t just that they were there when I needed them.

It was that when I found them,

I also found,

like one of Zenna Henderson’s People,

or the Ugly Duckling

or Anne of Green Gables

or Harry Potter,

my true family,

my “kindred spirits,” as Anne calls them,

my own kind.

And, finding them,

for the first time I knew,

like Ozma released from the witch’s spell,

like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

like Bethie and Jemmy and Valancy,

who I really was.

I had escaped,

but it was not from the real world.

It was from exile.

I had come home.

Just like in a story.

And I lived happily ever after.

Books are an amazing thing.

Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality

or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside

and play

as merely a distraction

or an amusement

or a waste of time

is dead wrong.

Books are the most important

the most powerful

the most beautiful thing

humans have ever created.

When Kip and Peewee find themselves on trial for earth

and trying to defend it against the charge

that it’s a danger which should be destroyed, Kip says,

“Have you heard our poetry?”

And what better defense of us could you come up with?

Books can reach out across space

and time

and language

and culture

and customs,

gender

and age

and even death

and speak to someone they never met,

to someone who wasn’t even born when they were written

and give them help

and advice

and companionship

and consolation.

In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man .

Nothing else that he builds ever lasts .

Monuments fall;

nations perish;

civilizations grow old and die out;

and, after an era of darkness ,

new races build others .

But in the world of books

are volumes that have seen this happen again and again

and yet live on ,

still young ,

still as fresh as the day they were written

still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

They are a miracle of rare device.

I never met Louisa May Alcott

or Robert Heinlein

or Rumer Godden or L. Frank Baum or Philip K. Dick

or Thornton Wilder or Dean Matthews of St. Paul’s,

but they reached out to me

across time,

across space,

and spoke to me

encouraged me

inspired me

taught me everything I know.

Saved my life.

And filled it with wonder.

And I just wanted to say thank you.

People keep asking me how I feel now that I’m a Grand Master,

and there are a lot of answers to that.

I feel incredibly honored

and humbled

and awestruck to find myself in such exalted company

as Robert Heinlein

and Joe Haldeman

and Bob Silverberg

and my dear friend Jack Williamson.

(My first thought when I found out about the Grand Master Award was, “He would be so proud of me.”)

I feel all of those things,

plus dismayed to find myself old enough to be made

a Grand Master

and delighted to have been named

and worried that I’ll wake up any moment now

and find that it was all a dream.

In short, I feel like Frodo

and Kip Russell

and Alice.

But mostly,

I feel like Beatrix Potter.

In the middle of World War II,

a reporter interviewed Beatrix Potter.

She was a very old lady by that time—

she would have been eighty-four, I think—

and she was living on a farm in the Lake District,

raising sheep for the army to turn into wool for uniforms,

and dealing with rationing

and food shortages

and fuel shortages.

At that particular moment,

she was dealing with a German plane

that had crashed in one of her fields,

as well as the aches and pains of being eighty-four.

And with the war.

Because Hitler had conquered Europe

and was sinking dozens of convoys

and bombing cities all over England,

and it looked like he might invade any minute.

And if he did, everybody knew what would happen—

conquest and executions and concentration camps.

But when the interviewer asked Beatrix Potter

what her greatest wish was,

she said,

“To live till the end of the war.

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out!”

That’s exactly how I feel.

It’s how I’ve always felt.

It’s why I started reading in the first place:

to find out what happened to Cinderella

and to Peter Pan,

to find out whether the twelve dancing princesses got caught

and whether Peter Rabbit made it out from under

Mr. McGregor’s flowerpot

and whether the prince was able to break the spell.

And it’s still the reason I read,

and I think the reason everybody reads.

Forget subtext

and symbolism

and lofty, existential themes.

We want to know—

what happens to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

and Frodo and Sam

and Scout

and the Yearling.

Does Lear get there in time to save Cordelia?

Does Eliza Doolittle come back to Henry Higgins?

Does Orpheus make it all the way back to the surface

without turning around to make sure Eurydice is following him?

We’ve got to know.

A friend of mine said that when she went to see

the Leonardo DiCaprio–Claire Danes version