ESSAY

By LANCE MORROW

I know a woman whose son died by drowning on the night of his high school graduation. She told me she got through the weeks and months afterward by reading and rereading the works of Willa Cather. The calm and clarity of Cather's prose stabilized the woman and helped her through the time.

We have rafts that we cling to in bad weather -- consolations, little solidarities, numbers we dial, people we wake up in the middle of the night.

Somehow it is not much fun to wake up the television set. The medium is a microwave: it makes reality taste wrong. Television transforms the world into a bright dust of electrons, noisy and occasionally toxic. Turn on the set and lingering dreams float out to mingle with CNN. Dreams are not an electronic medium.

During the war in the gulf, the escapist magician made urgent reality inescapable. Television became spookier than usual in its metaphysical way: the instant global connection that is informative and hypnotic and jumpy all at once -- immediate and unreal. The sacramental anchormen dispensed their unctions and alarms. During the war, I found shelter in books in the middle of the night. They are cozier. The global electronic collective, the knife of the news, could wait until the sun came up. The mind prefers to be private in its sleepless stretches.

Read what? I am not talking exactly about reading to escape. Nor about reading to edify and impress oneself. Paradise Lost is not much help at 3 in the morning, except of course as a heavy sleeping potion. I mean the kind of reading one does to keep sane, to touch other intelligences, to absorb a little grace. In Vietnam the soldiers said, "He is a man you can walk down the road with." They meant, a man you can trust when the road is very / dangerous. Every reader knows there are certain books you can go down the road with.

Everyone has his or her own list -- each list no doubt is peculiar, idiosyncratic. The books you keep for the middle of the night serve a deeply personal purpose, one of companionship. Your connection with them is a mystery of affinities. Each mind has its night weather, its topographies. I like certain books about fly fishing, for example, especially Norman Maclean's brilliant A River Runs Through It, which, like fishing itself, sometimes makes sudden, taut connections to divinity.

One man rereads the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He cherishes their world, the fogs and bobbies, the rational wrapped in an ambient madness, the inexplicable each time yielding its secret in a concluding sunburst, a sharp clarity.

Television news, when it flies in raw and ragged, can be lacerating. The medium destroys sequence. Reading restores to the mind a stabilization of linear prose, a bit of the architecture of thought. First one sentence, then another, building paragraphs, whole pages, chapters, books, until eventually something like an attention span returns and perhaps a steadier regard for cause and effect. War (and television) shatters. Reading, thought reconstruct. The mind in reading is active, not passive-depressive.

There is no point in being too reverent about books. Mein Kampf was -- is -- a book. Still, some books have the virtue of being processed through an intelligence. Writers make universes. To enter that creation gives the reader some intellectual dignity and a higher sense of his possibilities. The dignity encourages relief and acceptance. The universe may be the splendid, twittish neverland of P.G. Wodehouse (escape maybe, but a steadying one) or Anthony Trollope's order, or Tolkien's. I know a married couple who got through a tragic time by reading Dickens to each other every night. Years ago, recovering from a heart operation, I read Shelby Foote's three-volume history of the American Civil War -- a universe indeed, the fullest, most instructive tragedy of American history, all of the New World's Homer and Shakespeare enacted in four years. People find the books they need.

I like writers who have struggled with a dark side and persevered: Samuel Johnson, for example; his distinction and his majestic sanity both achieved the hard way. He emerged very human and funny and with astonishing resources of kindness. I have been reading Henry James' letters in the middle of the night. If James' novels are sometimes tiresome, his letters, which he produced in amazing quantity, are endlessly intelligent and alive. To a friend named Grace Norton, who was much afflicted, he wrote, "Remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own . . . We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most." He told her, "Even if we don't reach the sun, we shall at least have been up in a balloon."

Odd that 19th century writers should write a prose that seems so stabilizing in the late 20th. Ralph Waldo Emerson is good to have beside the bed between 3 and 6 in the morning. So is the book of Job. Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration for Mr. Toad and for what he has to teach about folly and resilience.

The contemplation of anything intelligent -- it need not be writing -- helps the mind through the black hours. Mozart, for example; music like bright ice water, or, say, the memory of the serene Palladian lines of Jefferson's Monticello. These things realign the mind and teach it not to be petty. All honest thought is a form of prayer. I read Samuel Johnson ("Despair is criminal") and go back to sleep.