AUTHOR: Sheri Lynch TITLE: Metamorphosis DATE: 1/18/2004 04:09:00 PM ----- BODY:

When I was about ten years old and living with my family in a cramped A-frame house in Alpine, Wyoming, I read the book that I'm pretty sure is to blame for my now-hopeless addiction to reading. The book belonged to my mother, and under any other circumstances I probably wouldn't have had much interest in it, or the patience to page through it. But with so much snow piled up outside, and no television or playmates to occupy me, I began leafing through my mom's small collection of hardcover books. The one I settled on was slim, bound in black and stamped with gold letters. The story was about a man who awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. He was horrified, and also helpless, lying on his back unable to comprehend his circumstances or communicate with his family. They were repulsed, and treated him cruelly. Knowing nothing about metaphor or allegory or symbolism, it simply looked to me like Gregor Samsa had somehow turned into a giant cockroach, and that even those who loved him best found him disgusting and wished he would hurry and die. What did that say about love, family, human decency? Gregor was still Gregor, yet his new form made him something loathsome, even shameful. Worst of all, he didn't know why this had happened to him, and the book didn't say, and there was no last-minute miracle, no happy ending. I was stricken. My mother tried to explain it to me, but she was distracted by other things -- the endless bad weather, our isolation, the collapse of her marriage. Also, "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka is a book far beyond the grasp of the typical fifth grader, which I most certainly was. She finally summed it up like this: "Look, not all caterpillars become butterflies. Sometimes it goes the other way. Do you understand?" I didn't, not really. But I had discovered something powerful in that book, though I couldn't name or describe it. It was a feeling, not unlike hunger or excitement, a hollow fluttering deep inside. It hinted at whole worlds of meaning, layered atop and alongside and knotted within each other. Like a sleepwalker, I had only brushed against the edges and outlines of far bigger and more puzzling things. I began to devour books, any books, jumping from "Johnny Tremaine" to Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" to "The Exorcist" to "David Copperfield". I read everything, and indiscriminately. A dog-eared copy of "The Happy Hooker" by Xavier Hollander received the same intense scrutiny as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". I didn't understand a lot of what I read, and needed a dictionary just to keep pace with many of the words. But none of that mattered. What I loved was how the world fell away as soon as I opened a book. Reading muted whatever reality was raging around me, made it bearable, or perhaps more accurately, made it invisible. Reading became a form of hiding. I disappeared into the pages, into a world that moved at exactly the pace I set, populated by characters whose behavior, no matter how intolerable, at least served a story. I liked books better than people, craved them, and chafed at too much conversation or interaction. The things I read felt more real than the things I lived, and when I considered my unhappy surroundings, books just seemed the far wiser bet. How could a houseful of heartbreak, rage, and disappointment possibly compete with the richly textured worlds conjured by Ray Bradbury or Thomas Wolfe or Collette or Walt Whitman? I don't read as much as I used to -- my babies have seen to that. My two book per week habit is down to two per month now. I still long for books though, and am grateful that nursing presents a guilt-free opportunity to read. That's how I'll remember both Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides -- books I consumed in bursts while feeding my infant daughters. There are certain other books that are also anchored that way in time and memory. Proust may have his madeleines, but I have Proust. Specifically, the battered copy of "Remembrance of Things Past" that I bought for a dollar one sweltering July and read in a weekend, sprawled on a mattress on the floor of my un- air-conditioned studio apartment at 46^th and Baltimore in Philadelphia. And "The Stand", which made me so anxious that I slammed it shut, shoved it under the couch, and fled my uncle's house. I walked for hours around his Williamsport neighborhood rather than be alone for one more minute with Stephen King. "The Sun Also Rises" is the book I carried in my pocket while backpacking around Europe, and Hemingway's clipped and austere prose colors my memories of both that summer and of my then-rebellious and clueless self. Mention any but the last Harry Potter book and I'm back in Eric's bedroom on a summer night, reading aloud or listening to my husband read, the three of us curled up on the bed, dogs snoring on the floor below. Occasionally I worry that I've given too much of my life to reading. Should I be out more, doing more, experiencing more? And more of what, exactly? What have I missed? I'm so fenced in by words that I can scarcely imagine how to fill the day without them. Words feel as necessary as oxygen. A few months ago I read (there I go again) that memory depends on language to a very high degree, which partially explains why most of us are unable to recall our infancy and early childhood. Without words to describe them, our experiences become faint and inaccessible, not so much lost as irretrievable. I now picture my own memory as a dusty library, with the books that are my babyhood piled on a bottom shelf, jacketless. With no catalog numbers to identify them, they'll never be checked out. And anyway, they've been pushed aside by heaps of other memories, some real, some dreamed. Some that I only read about in books, but have come to think of as my own. Metamorphosis, as my mom once tried to explain, means more than just mere change. It demands a total sacrifice, usually of all that you were before. It's the complete transformation of the very substance of a thing. There's no going back, and in nature at least, no regrets. Which works out beautifully, if you happen to be the worm who becomes a butterfly. Or the girl who becomes a reader.

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