Gears of Imagination
By Ludmila Rishkova
March 14, 2011
There are decisive points in everyone’s life that give one a general idea of what one is to do with one’s future. For me, one of these points was getting a copy of The Shining for my fifteenth birthday. It was a gift from one of my mother’s friends who knew I was pretty much ready to devour any book that was given me and that I had read Gone with the Wind at least ten times already. The copy of the novel was in Russian and the cover rather bland, so I didn’t think much of it and put off reading it for weeks. Finally, after I had finished Margaret Mitchell’s novel for the umpteenth time, I decided to give it a shot.
My parents, my younger brother and I lived in a three bedroom apartment in Montreal’s suburban area. I had my own room – courtesy of flowering teenage bloom – which I decorated with everything deemed ‘cool’ enough: a poster of Kurt Cobain, cool as a cucumber, guitar in hands and a cigarette stuck between the lips, snapshots of my teenage years, and my attempts at drawing. I didn’t study much, the right answers to math, physics and history seemed to flow naturally enough, but I read and drew incessantly.
Looking back, I wish I took my time about reading the book, but having no idea of the importance it was to hold in my life I jumped in with all the thoughtless readiness of a teenager. I devoured it. The school done, I rushed through the chores and the homework, waited until my parents went to sleep, smoked half a cigarette hanging out half out of our second story window, buried myself beneath covers, and read.
I read well into the night, slept little, and made it to school the next day exhausted and late. I read until my eyes burned, until I fell asleep with the lights on, until the dawn rose while I still gripped the book in my hands. For the first time I was terrified by the content of the book. I was scared through and through and yet I couldn’t let go.
Jack Torrance mystified me. He didn’t seem to be a bad man and yet something was bent on forcing him to make choices that would lead him and his family into precarious, dangerous situations.
The pretty Wendy Torrance seemed quite the sweet and understanding mother any child Danny Torrance’s age could wish for and I trusted her all the way. When she worried and was uneasy, so was I. Although I had nothing in common with her, she was still the perfect medium to guide me through the story. Thinking back, it seems as though I lived every moment of the novel through her.
Identification is a powerful tool both for writers and readers. If one cannot adopt a character’s point of view and feel and live the story along their side, I would argue that the book is not worth reading. Wendy Torrance didn’t have the most prominent or the most active role, but along her side I worried about the gifted Danny, felt a mixture of love, worry, and helplessness for Jack Torrance, and hoped for the best while I feared the worst from the Overlook Hotel. Through my link to her, the novel came alive, and I was rushing through it at a terrifying pace. I was right there, next to the Torrance family, invisible and helpless to do anything but observe. At times I even felt like one of the Overlook’s ghosts, urging the Torrance family to stay just a little longer, to stretch the pleasure of their visit, to become one with the party, and yet that’s what I dreaded the most.
The ending came all too soon. By the time I hit the last chapters I could not slow down to delay the gratification the ending would provide and by the end of the last page, I was hooked for life.
The gears of imagination had finally clicked into place, and I knew that all I wanted were two things: indulge in every little thing Stephen King ever wrote, and offer the same kind of pleasure of reading to others. I did not imagine I would edit a science fiction web-zine. I imagined myself a writer, bringing one terrifying story after another to life. That, I’m still working on.
Although my love for reading was no mystery to me or anyone around me as I have been reading incessantly since the age of three, I had discovered one thing by reading The Shining: that I had a penchant for the mysterious darkness of horror, mystery and science fiction. The week I finished the novel, I got a Greenfield Park Library card and three by three I began taking home Stephen King novels.
I was unstoppable, I would read at breakfast for all of three minutes, I would read in the beginning of each class, instead of hanging out with friends during lunch time I would go home to relish an hour of reading over heated leftovers. I would read at suppertime, forking my food with one hand and holding the pages open with the other. I would bypass TV and read in my room.
My parents raised their eyebrows and commented on my dinner-reading as socially unacceptable. Still, I sensed their silent approval in spite of the fact that the dinner setting counted a heavy brick of a novel among its dishes. I returned the novels to the library spotted with greasy fingerprints and dogged ears.
Although probably not a great novel from many a point of view, as some may resume it as A Story about a Haunted Hotel, The Shining played a great role in my life by setting me on a decisive course. It fed the imagination, it questioned what was truly important, it emphasized the power and consequence of choice, and it got me hooked for life. Besides, any novel can be resumed in one sentence easily coloured by one’s own prejudice, whether favourable or not.
And come to think of it now, many years since I laid my hands on it for the first time, The Shining was THE novel that made me think of reading in other terms than pleasure or pastime. I realized for the first time that reading was not only a means of entertainment; it was food for thought, escape from the chores and minor mishaps of daily life and it was what made me excel at school without much studying as it forced me to be observant, attentive and focused all the while making me somewhat socially inept. And yet, up to this day, it is my most favourite thing in this world as it enlarges one’s experience. Even now I read in the subway, in the bathroom, at dinner, in waiting rooms. I read in the morning, daytime and night. Any spare minute I use to devour a sentence, an image in words, a thought.
There are decisive moments in everyone’s life, and in mine, the discovery of the depths of the pleasure of reading was the major one.