My mother always said I was born a hundred years too late. However I’m most content to live right where I’m at. When I want to walk in the old days and participate in some event, all I need do is open a book and find myself right in the thick of it. Yes, it takes some imagination, but over the course of a lifetime I’ve developed a pretty good one. Books have helped fuel it.
While reading the new Michael Beschloss book “Presidents of War” I ran across a statement showing how President Lincoln broadened his imagination and knowledge. Things weren’t going well for the Northern army in the early part of the Civil War, but the generals always had excuses. Lincoln had no military experience with which to counter their arguments, so as Beschloss wrote, “Trying to make up for his deficiencies, Lincoln studied books from the Library of Congress on military history and strategy.”
Tara Westover gave herself a complete education from books. Born into a survivalist family in Idaho that was suspicious of many of the bulwarks of society, including public schools, she was home-schooled and taught only what her parents wanted her to learn. Gradually as she matured she found books on her own and graduated from colleges, eventually earning a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England. Read her best-selling memoir “Educated” to understand her journey.
Our recent attendance at the South Dakota book festival exposed us to another young lady who broke the chains of strict family control to find her own truth. Megan Phelps-Roper wrote the book “Unfollow” detailing her story of the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, the one that ridiculed dead soldiers at their funerals. Through the internet she realized another world existed which she started to want for herself. Again, self-education through reading books gave her the foundation to set herself free.
The foregoing stories about Lincoln, Westover, and Phelps-Roper deal with real people changing their lives and stirring their imaginations through books. I have always liked the story of a fictitious dreamer and his wild imaginings in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs”.
James Thurber wrote this story in which Mitty imagines he is heroic in five different situations. He daydreams he’s a pilot of a plane in a hurricane and wins the respect of his crew, a skilled surgeon who must improvise a lifesaving technique while operating on a famous person, a defendant in a murder trial whose lawyer argues he couldn’t have killed a person but pride made him say he could’ve. He’s a soldier in battle who volunteers to race across the battlefield and retrieve ammunition which wins the commendation of his sergeant, and he faces a firing squad and stares back at them with contempt and daring.
James Thurber’s imagination invented the character of Walter Mitty who in turn enjoys his life in the imaginative scenes he conjures. Unfortunately, something or somebody would always and sudden appear to pop the bubble and bring him back to reality. Lincoln, Westover, and Phelps-Roper imagined a change in their lives should take place and went about finding a way to bring it into reality.
As for my imaginary life, I am on the stage accepting the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Uh, oh, my wife just told me to take out the garbage.
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