This may sound strange, but many of my fondest memories are of reading books. Books have an immense, complex relationship with human memory. They can solidify what was once uncertain or contextualize what seemed like a sure bet. If you’ve ever read a work of fiction that made you fundamentally question the world you live in, you have some idea of what I mean.

This is not to say I don’t have fantastic, vivid memories of people and places and life-altering events. Memory is a strange, selective thing. I used to tell people I had a “three day memory”… that I could remember things I had to do three days from now or things I did three days ago, but anything beyond that was beyond my realm of retention. Looking back, I’ve begun to realize that I do have a memory for weird, obscure sensations, like deja vu, or the times I’ve noticed colliding thoughts or my own synesthesia, the smell of the sunlight coming down through the trees when I first listened to “You Forgot It In People,” or the thickness of the air while hiking fog-drenched mountains in Ireland, or the reddened faces of my friends while reading poetry and dancing in our old house in Asheville. I couldn’t tell you how to get back to the place, but I distinctly remember the sensation of careening down a 100-foot gorge and feeling the mist of the waterfall intermingling with my ridiculous fear. I remember that fear very well. In reality, most people don’t remember the details, but they hold on strongest to the feelings and sensations they felt in those moments.

When I think back on what has made me the person I am, all those memories feel counter-intuitive. The immense fear of careening into a gorge pales in comparison to what I remember about the places I sat quietly and read, and the sensations I felt while reading, alone. I remember long summer afternoons as a child, laying on my bed reading R.L. Stein books. I remember bundling up and reading by candle-light during an ice storm in high school. It was anepic alternative history of WWII, one in which the Nazis won and tortured delinquent children (after a particularly graphic scene, this became the only book I’ve ever thrown down in disgust). Of course I read good things too. I was particularly fond of the science fiction of Jules Verne and Robert Heinlein, anything by Steinbeck, and stories about young people, from Tom Sawyer to Dubliners and A Separate Peace. In college I decided I was an Americanist and I started reading more serious fiction from Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, and lots and lots of modernist poetry.

I have borrowed books and stolen them. I always read whatever I could get my hands on, which has made for some interesting literary selections. I have read the gamut from total trash novels to incomprehensibly heady philosophic works. I remember re-reading 1984 in one night in someone else’s dorm room, just because it was sitting on their bookshelf, and I liked the challenge of reading an entire book in an evening. What a thrill. Another time, I came across a book that opened up an entire new realm of uncertainty. When I lived in California I worked at a Philips 76 station. My manager was an ex-con with a heart of gold, who would let the employees read while we worked. When we hired a new guy, who had gone back to school to study literature, he brought some hefty theory books to work. I wondered how he could read those while actually working. It was an easy job, but not THAT easy. I remember reading The DaVinci Code at work, my feet kicked up on the counter. The DaVinci Code sort of reads itself. Critical Theory and Society does not. I started talking to him about literary and social theory. About postmodernism, and the idea that we had transcended simple plot characterizations, storylines, and linguistics themselves, and moved into something more complex. House of Leaves had just been published, and people were going bananas over it. Then this guy got fired and left all his books just sitting in a cabinet. Naturally, I took them.

I started reading from a book of his on contemporary continental philosophy. I don’t really know if reading Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault as a nineteen-year-old really changed my life for the better. I was overwhelmed by the concepts of subjectivity and “the image.” My world was pretty much turned on its head. Knowledge gleaned from literature began to look more like Swiss cheese than anything else. Everything became something to be prodded, and a true cynic was born. I got some pretty radical ideas from 20th century French philosophy. I started thinking I would be a culture jammer and tried my hand at street graffiti. I wanted to usurp the status quo with my knowledge that the status quo was only a facade. Of course now I realize that lots of people know that.

It took me years to rediscover some semblance and solidity of truth in knowledge or books. When I came back to planet earth, I was probably halfway into my twenties. I tired of looking for symbols in any and everything. I was pretty tired of doubting everything I ever knew. I read Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown and discovered that even symbols have a very basic simplicity to them, a simplicity that can mean something. There is something comforting about knowing that our cultural symbols and status quos can be “true” in some sense. There is a reason we generalize things. I began to see that even the products of our belief systems become true simply by virtue of our belief in them, and everything sort of came full-circle. There is no ultimate truth or ultimate subjectivity. We exist somewhere in-between.

I’m an impatient reader. I’m not very good at being pinned down. There is no single book that changed my life, because I am constantly changing and so are they. I guess I feel like books don’t change lives, or maybe that the book that changed my life is the one I haven’t read yet. This is what keeps me reading, what keeps me searching. The ideas in books are simply a reflection of ourselves, and more particularly, of our neuroses. If we change, we change ourselves because we believe in them or don’t. We buy into them or we toss them aside. We change our own perceptions and memories and sensations because they are fundamentally all we control. They are the makeup of our memories and ourselves. Books just fuel the fire. (No pun intended. Do not burn books.)

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This post was written, a bit late (again), as part of a blogging game called Synchro-blogging. The players are The Creative Collective. Read what the others have to say about “The book that changed my life.”