Rhapsody

Browsing through old stuff on my computer, I found an essay I wrote a few years ago that I want to revisit by sharing it here. The essay was written for a competition around the question, "Which book has most inspired you as a writer?"... my answer surprised and intrigued me! here you go:

When I was six years old, Enid Blyton’s The Wishing Chair and The Magic Faraway Tree taught me to dream. As I grew older, Jonathan Livingston Seagull reminded me never to give up on my dreams. After I moved to college in America, Little Women gave me a family to turn to when I missed home, and Jane Eyre gave me the courage to be myself when it seemed like no one understood me. Crime and Punishment never fails to make me afraid of myself and those around me, whereas The Little Prince makes me laugh at both. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran reminds me how joyful, how empowering, and how life-transforming literature can be. Any of these lessons is inspiration enough for me to write.

But when I ask myself which single book has inspired my writing more than any other, I find the question inextricably linked to another equally hard question—the question of why I write in the first place. I think back to the seven-year-old in me who began scribbling “poetry” on scraps of paper. What drove her to write?

Smiling, I realize that the answer lies in a worn-out copy of the Roget’s Thesaurus, which occupies the place of pride on my bookshelf. With its musty smell, yellowed pages and loose binding, it is not the best thesaurus I have, but it is the most important book I shall ever own.

My mother gave me this thesaurus on my seventh birthday. This was her recognition of, and contribution to, the love of words that she could already see haunting her young daughter. Not knowing what to do with it then, I placed it on my bookshelf, where it patiently waited to be inaugurated two years later.

I first opened my thesaurus for an essay I was writing in my fourth-grade English class. The essay was titled “If I were a peacock,” and I was looking for a word that meant “happiness.” Out of the options my thesaurus offered, I chose “rhapsody,” not because I knew the difference between “happiness” and “rhapsody” but because it sounded beautiful, almost like something that peacocks could dance to. And thus began a lifelong romance with words.

I don’t write to teach; I don’t write to console or comfort; and I don’t write to empower or delight. I write because I love words. I love words, I love their melodies, and I love the feel of a new word—or a new way of using an old word—rolling over my tongue. I can still picture peacocks dancing to the sound of the word “rhapsody,” and I still delight in the nuances of the language, the subtle differences between words that my first thesaurus showed me. That’s why I write.

There’s another reason why that thesaurus inspires me—when I look at those worn-out pages, I think of my first cheerleader. How can I not be inspired when I think of the woman who believed in my dreams before I even knew what they were, the woman who gave me the tools to pursue my dreams before I understood why she was giving them to me? One day, I’m going to dedicate a book to her. That, too, is why I write.

Sometimes I am tempted to take off the fluorescent green tape that has held my thesaurus together for the last ten years and to have it bound once more. Sometimes, I am tempted to put a neatly printed sticker over the childish scrawl adorning (or ruining, depending on whether you appreciate children’s art!) its front cover. But I’ve always stopped myself just in time. The scribble and the green tape represent the child who loved this book so dearly that she wanted it to look pretty and never tear or fall apart. I have no right to take the book away from that child, or to take the child away from that book.

In that little thesaurus, there live the childish wonder at the music and beauty of words, the adolescent appreciation of the subtleties of the language, the young woman’s understanding of the importance of choosing her words carefully, a mother’s confidence in her daughter’s dreams, and the difference between happiness and rhapsody. What greater inspiration could any writer ever ask for?