By John Cowan
How many lives have you been allowed to live? One?
If so, too bad, so sad.
I have been allowed to live a thousand lives.
From third grade on my head has been buried in books. From then to the end of my undergraduate days those books have been for the most part fiction. My teachers warned me that I would get nowhere that way. Even my classmates thumped on me to get with the program and spend more time on Latin, or Greek, or German. It was only when I was on the brink of entering the serious world where my lack of knowledge might get me and those I served in serious trouble that I started reading with some passion books for my profession. But even then, a novel was close at hand to be read for relief.
Barack Obama, the philosopher President, once said that the reading of fiction created a compassionate person. The process of taking marks on paper, turning them into a voice in my head, seduces me into beginning to think I am the character on the page.
Tony Hillerman, the novelist of Navajo cops, introduces a psychopathic killer as a central character in one of his books. He tells the story of the killer as a child being left by his single mother with his aunt and she in turn dropping his six year old self at a home for children with the promise to return soon. Every night when he went to sleep in the dormitory, he left his cowboy hat on the end of the bed so that if his aunt came at night she would know which little boy was hers.
Every time I read this I feel in my sick stomach his waking disappointment.
I know that it is fiction, and Tony invented that child, but Tony was a great novelist. Great novelists do not create characters from whole cloth. I know well there are many little boys and girls throughout the world trying to make sense out of a disastrous situation, and not succeeding well at all. When I cry for Tony’s little boy, I cry for all lost little boys. I even remember the lost times of my own childhood and the hats I left on the ends of beds.
Then I remember the entire story, and I realize that I am weeping for a psychopathic killer. As I should.