My brother walked in my front door holding four books. I asked what they were. Just some novels that have been meaningful to me, he answered.
In the same way that I don’t understand when my mother-in-law says the painting she saw at the Met moved her, I didn’t understand what it was like to have a novel mean something. I’d just finished a John Irving book, one of fewer than five novels I’d read in the 15 years since high school. No novel I’d read had meant anything more to me than a campfire story: at best interesting enough to consider for a moment or two before sleep that night but no further.
I asked my brother what he meant. The books “spoke to a feeling” he had, he said. Wanting this feeling to become more intense is what made him decide to join a Buddhist monastery. For my brother had just finished a science PhD and then—in a lovely alignment of feeling in which what he felt he most wanted to do and what he felt he really ought to do pointed to the same activity—became a monk.
His words “spoke to a feeling” were imprecise enough to allow me an exciting interpretation of what had happened when he read these novels. They had, to some degree, I thought, created the conviction to join a monastery.
I was intrigued to learn that novels have such power. So, with the same sort of blind hope that, in unskeptical moments, makes people ask others for advice on how to fall in love, I asked my brother how one finds novels that are meaningful. He shrugged, of course: just read lots of them. I asked for a recommendation; he said Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It was one of few possessions—that and a toothbrush—that he had brought to the monastery with him.
And so, I checked Siddhartha out of the library.
