The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (37 page)

He steals from the old woman and hides his bounty under a rock. But almost immediately he is overcome with appalling remorse. A terrible liar, he wanders around the city racked with fever and raving. Meanwhile, another man confesses to the murders and it’s clear that Raskolnikov could get away with his crime if he chose to—were it not for his conscience, and the
intervention of his wise friend Sonya, who understands how his life cannot resume without a confession.

Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of his young hero’s torment is fascinating and painful to witness. It is mostly down to Sonya that Raskolnikov survives. If you don’t have a Sonya in your life, borrow Raskolnikov’s. Confess, pay your penance, expunge your guilt. Only then will you deserve the redemption and freedom that are the rewards for doing so.

See also:
Guilt, reading associated
•
Regret

The Little White Car

DANUTA DE RHODES

Y
our forehead is a stage, thudding with the beat of thirty drummers. Your tongue is a piece of cooked bacon that’s been sitting in the fridge for a week. And your mind is a washing machine on a fast spin cycle, with shreds of the events of last night whapping against the sides, revealing their colors for a brief, ghastly moment before sinking back into the foamy suds.

Yes, you have a hangover.

You get out of bed, or off the sofa, or wherever it was you passed out. You stumble toward the sink and fill a glass with cold water. You tip back your head (ouch!) and begin to gulp, the lovely cool liquid bringing back to life the . . . oh, God. That’s when you remember. Worse than the pounding head. Worse than the confusion. The memory. Of what. Exactly. It was. You did. Last night.

At this point, reach for
The Little White Car
by Danuta de Rhodes. Because whatever it was you did, it wasn’t as bad as what Veronique did, the spoiled twenty-two-year-old Parisian girl who emerged from her hangover to realize, with a plunge into a new ice age . . . Well, you’ll have to read it and see.

Call in sick, then go back to bed. There you will read—in big, fat type
that won’t challenge your eyes and straightforward prose that won’t befuddle your head—a lesson in how much worse it
could
have been.

Go on, indulge.
*

See also:
Anxiety
•
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Headache
•
Lethargy
•
Nausea
•
Pain, being in
•
Paranoia
•
Sweating

Fahrenheit 451

RAY BRADBURY

H
appiness: the ultimate goal in life. Or is it? Many of us spend our lives searching for this transitory state in love, work, travel, and home life. As images of material wealth and blissful lifestyles taunt us from advertisements and television screens, we often feel like we just can’t get enough—not enough luck, romance, possessions, or free time. It’s a modern malaise. Or is it? Didn’t Dickens’s Fagin think he deserved a bigger piece of (someone else’s) meat pie? Didn’t Voltaire’s Candide demonstrate the folly of thinking that “the best is yet to be”? And long before, then, weren’t Milton’s Adam and Eve told they’d be “happiest if ye seek no happier state”—advice that they, being human, ignored? Start raising your personal requirements for what it takes to be “happy” and you will open yourself up to all kinds of misery.

We’re with Eastern philosophy on this one: the relentless pursuit of happiness is an ailment, and must be cured. Ray Bradbury knew this too. His prescient
Fahrenheit 451
, first published in 1953, came very close to showing us life as we now know it. In his dystopian future, nobody reads novels anymore. At first this is because people want their fiction in smaller and smaller doses, not having the attention span or patience to read a whole book. (Sound familiar? See: Give up halfway through, tendency to.) Then they start to think that books are their enemy, irresponsibly presenting different views and states of mind. Surely they’d all be happier living in an emotionless no-man’s-land with no strong feelings at all?

To counteract their emotional void, deprived of culture and deep thought as they are, people begin to live faster and faster, racing around the city at breakneck speeds—and killing whatever gets in their way. They almost never see their children, who go to school nine days out of ten. Having kids is a waste of time anyway; the women prefer to stay at home watching an endless interactive soap called
The Family
—the fate of which becomes more important to them than their own. (Brilliant as he was, Bradbury didn’t quite make the leap into a time when women might want to work too.) Doped by these sagas, they go to bed with “shells” in their ears transmitting junky newsfeeds and more meaningless dramas all night long. Sleeping pills are popped like candy. Suicide is common, and attracts little remark.

When Montag, a fireman whose job it is to burn illegal books—and sometimes the people reading them too—meets a teenage girl who takes the time to look at the stars, smell the grass, and question the dandelions about love, he realizes that he is not as happy in his emotionally neutered state as he thought he was. He begins to wake up to a world of beauty and feeling, and wonders what the books that he burns might contain. One night he reads Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” to his wife’s guests, interrupting an episode of
The Family
to do so, and the result of his reading is uncontrollable weeping and heartbreak: “Poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness;
all
that mush!” one distraught listener cries. Montag is forced to burn his own books—and his house with them—but he holds on to the belief that a future without the wisdom of books is an unbearable one. He would rather feel and suffer than live the comatose life that “civilization” considers the route to happiness.

Live to the full not by seeking happiness, but by embracing knowledge, literature, truth, and feeling of every sort. And in case Bradbury’s vision becomes a reality, consider learning a novel by heart, as Montag does. You never know when you might need to pass it on to the rest of humanity.

See also:
Dissatisfaction
•
Mr./Mrs. Right, looking for

The River Between

NGUGI WA THIONG’O

•   •   •

1984

GEORGE ORWELL

H
ate is like a poisonous plant. Allow it to take root inside you and it will gradually consume you from within, contaminating everything you touch. Whether you hate another person, other drivers, semolina, hipster bloggers, or reality TV, it doesn’t make much difference. Neither does it make it any better if the hate is justified and understandable, such as hating someone who has done you a grievous harm. The fact that you are nurturing this violent emotion in your heart will ultimately be a violence against yourself.
*

In
The River Between
, Ngugi wa Thiong’o shows very clearly how hatred can set in between two factions with opposed religious, political, or philosophical beliefs. Those consumed by hate would do well to read this fablelike retelling of
Romeo and Juliet.
As you read, ask yourself if you, too, are clinging too rigidly to a set of beliefs.

On either side of the river Honia (meaning “cure”) lie two ridges. On one is the village of Kameno, and on the other Makuyu. Here the Gikuyu people of Kenya live undisturbed—until the white man arrives with his “clothes like butterflies,” new ways, and new religion. Joshua, an elder of Kameno, is the first convert to Christianity. Soon he has the villagers turning away from their tribal customs. Trouble hits when his daughter Muthoni decides that she wants to be initiated into womanhood in the traditional “beautiful” way—circumcision—and dies following the procedure. She rapidly becomes a symbol for everything deemed barbaric and pagan about the old Gikuyu ways. The two villages pit themselves against each other, the old ways against the new. And when Waiyaki from Makuyu, with his beautiful “kinking” hair and eyes that “blaze,” falls in love with Nyambura, Joshua’s remaining daughter, the people are given a focus for their hate. This shared
hatred gains momentum in the same way a herd of bullocks running downhill gains speed, and in the way of things that have lost control, it heads only one way: to mayhem and destruction.

Don’t let yourself get swept up mindlessly by hate in this way. Instead, allow yourself to be lulled by Thiong’o’s poetic, expansive prose, the importance he places on the land, and the concept of love as a guiding principle. Don’t be a zealot. See things from another’s point of view. Be open to compromise and embrace difference. This way you can turn your hate into love.

If letting go of hatred is just too hard, read George Orwell’s
1984.
Start by studying “Hate Week”—seven days dedicated to rousing processions, speeches, banners, and films intended to whip the masses into a frenzy of hatred for the state’s number one enemy, Eurasia. By day six, the crowd is in such a maddened delirium of hatred that if they could get their hands on individual Eurasians they’d tear them to pieces. But then, suddenly, the object of hatred is switched. Word goes around that the enemy is no longer Eurasia. It’s Eastasia. Hurriedly, posters are ripped off walls, banners are trampled underfoot. The crowd barely misses a beat. Within a few moments, the “feral roars of rage” have been redirected to the Eastasians instead.