In Search of Meaning

On Hagstone and Stone Yard Devotional

Why do our reading habits change?

Over the last year or so, I have experienced a gulf widening between me and the types of novels I would normally read. I have still been reading and picking up books, but the increase in those I have set down after only getting some of the way through has rattled my intuition of what to read next. There are very few books I have finished feeling satisfied, and several I have enjoyed only to lose interest two thirds of the way through (e.g. The Secret History; can someone please tell me whether it is worth finishing, thank you).

I am convinced something has undermined my confidence in choosing, and finishing, a novel, and that is a troubling realisation. I do not like being told what to read, I do not trust very popular books easily; I firmly believe in trusting my intuition as to what I need, not just want, to read.

There is a kind of unease that comes with wanting to read but not knowing what. A craving for the emotional rush of immersing oneself in another world or life. Other people feel that way about a tv show or movies, it manifests in different ways. We do it to feel something personal, maybe find some new perspective or comfort in the familiar. Perhaps we are looking for some way to navigate our lives in a meaningful way or find a company of experience.

Meaning-seeking is at the heart of why I read. I have been trying to articulate an answer to the question of why I read for months, writing and rewriting this piece. That reading is about finding meaning and not just entertainment feels profound and yet so obvious it hurts. It has taken me a year of wondering what is wrong with me to realise that many of the books I was reading were not serving me. That what was undermining my reading habits was a shift in my own perspective.

This is not to say that those books were bad or could not hold meaning for others. Rather, our taste for stories evolves to resonate with our own emotional landscapes, and there are as many of those as there are human beings.

I have big questions about life and the meaning of it all. I do not believe in God, although I wish I could, but there is something reverent about how someone can articulate a feeling or wordless thought by putting pen to paper. And you know it when you see it.

I picked up Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson from my local bookstore in August with its bright fuchsia cover superimposed with a dark cliffside and crashing waves, the title of the book plastered down the middle in bright green. I have a deep interest in the mythical and humanity’s desire to explain the natural world around us, and Gleeson’s novel is set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland with eco-gothic undertones.

There are many elements to the novel, but the thing that grasped me whole handedly was main character Nell’s relationship to her art, which is grounded in the environment around her. For Nell, she was a successful artist in her 20s and then as she passed into the next decade, the attention and accolades she received dissipated almost entirely. Nell never wanted to sell out, to make art that others would want, only the art that came to her and felt urgent. Yet, the consequences found Nell living week to week on the tiny island, doing local tours, cleaning hotel rooms. What I liked most about her character is that, while others would view the odd jobs as an unsavoury compromise for an uncomfortable life, Nell did not view it as a compromise because it allowed her to do the work she found meaningful. There were ways for Nell to make her life more comfortable, but it was always her choice to live the way she wanted to.

I wonder how many of us would choose to make art if we were given the means to sustain ourselves without spending most of our waking hours working. I often ask friends or colleagues what they would do or study if given the chance to do it all again, and very often the answer is completely different to what they find themselves doing. I started to struggle with this question not long after entering a profession that I am not sure I want to stay in. I studied law but always said I never wanted to be a lawyer. Then I became a lawyer because I did not know what else to do. Now, I am grappling with the fact that is not a good enough reason for me to continue down this career path.

Those feelings came bubbling overtop as I read Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. With its bleak and evocative cover of the Monaro tundra, its prehistoric boulders shouldering out of the sparse landscape and into the naked blue sky, I could not have experienced a more natural reading progression from Hagstone. Contemplation is the beating heart of Stone Yard Devotional, where our unnamed 60-something narrator leaves her career, husband and life for a nunnery in the Monaro close to where she grew up. She is in search of something she knows not. As an audience member at the recent Canberra Writers Festival said, the narrator ‘unsubscribed from her life’. The novel reads as a diary and the profundity of Wood’s craft as a writer is in the closeness we feel to her narrator as her thoughts and reflections about her life slowly and haltingly at first unravel into hauntingly beautiful moments of revelation. I was deeply affected witnessing the narrator’s perceptions of and love for her mother grow as she realises her mother’s kindness and strength of character in the face of the small-minded scrutiny of others. And in the rarity of those types of people in this world, for even our narrator is not innocent.

I cried non-stop reading the last 20 or so pages. I was on a flight home at the time, it was night and dark in the cabin and I could not have stopped my tears for anything even had people been able to see my face above the illuminated book. Not for anything about the plot but for the way in the novel explores meaning in our lives beyond the labels we put on ourselves and why we treat each other the way we do. If I could read one book again for the first time, it would be Stone Yard Devotional.

Last week, I listened to a Read This interview with Melanie Cheng (author of two collections of short stories and the newly published, beautifully reviewed, The Burrow) on my drive home. The below excerpt dovetails with why Hagstone and Stone Yard Devotional sank into my heart and settled when so many recent others have not. When asked by the interviewer, “What do you want for characters like the characters in The Burrow when you're writing? What's the relationship there?”, Cheng responded:

“I think I am interested in complexity. I really am not interested in heroes and villains, in good and bad people. Because I have seen people through work [as a general practice doctor] who have done awful things.

But I've seen them as a person and I've seen them in a vulnerable state and it's hard to hate that person, and it's hard to reduce them to this awful act that they've done. It's actually scary and maybe that's why people like to keep these hero villain categories because once you start to see the human element of these awful acts, then it's confronting for you as a fellow human being, in that maybe you would be capable of doing some of these terrible things also.

It's a weird thing that desire for empathy when we read, that desire to feel like, as you say, there's a hero we can cheer for or we can feel a little less shabby or lost ourselves.

Yeah. Well, I like reading vulnerable characters because, again, it makes me feel less alone in my vulnerability. So that's the impulse.”

What both novels gave to me was a window into the vulnerability of two women who return again and again to their connection to the environment around them to find answers about their purpose, their own meaning, in this life. Quiet places. Places that have existed long before they got there and will continue to exist long after they leave it. The sense of expansion of consciousness to explore my interior life is what kept me reading these novels, and kept me thinking long after I finished them.

Reading novels vivifies the concept of sonder—the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as one’s own. The right novel in the right hands is the beginning of a greater empathy for others and for oneself.

May our reading habits further lead us down that path.

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