Light Reading #1: On the opening line of Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse
Something new: To glean more nourishment from my reading, I'll start a series of posts where I pay close attention to a few lines of a book. You're invited to read along. Share your own observations.
“Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind.”
So much depends upon a sturdy opening line.
This is the first line of Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse.
It’s an invitation — Here at the beginning. You are meant to keep reading. It’s a promise of a journey. And it acknowledges that wherever here might be, some kind of trouble is happening there. The End, after all, was on everyone’s mind.
Okay, hold on.
Before we look more closely at this line,
I should clarify what’s happening here.
If you know the name Leif Enger, that’s probably because you’ve read his first — and quite beloved — novel Peace Like a River. That’s the book that made big Enger fans of me and countless other readers.
I’ve been excited about reading this book since it landed in stores in April of 2024. It’s been on my nightstand for a long, long time. I’ve started it several times, enough for that line to stick with me. But it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten past the first page of a Leif Enger novel — or any novel at all.
Here’s why: As I teach class on academic and creative writing—a lot of them—I tend to read my students’ work every day. I read that work slowly, making comments, scribbling questions, and sometimes meeting with them to discuss that writing. I’ve also been working overtime to get a book finished, and to keep up my routine of film reviews, which I read and revise carefully. Since what I’m reading is often a mess—whether it’s my students’ writing or my own—the process strains my attention and requires me to constantly interrupt the reading process. So, I find that when I get home at the end of the day, I don’t feel like reading anything. At all. Reading for pleasure is an altogether different experience than marking up student writing, but it uses a lot of the same muscles. For a while now, I’ve been feeling burnout from staring at too much text.
What a frustration this has been—discovering that while I love teaching students about reading and writing, teaching has cost me the time and energy I need for my own reading. And it has made writing far more difficult.
I refuse to give up writing—writing is, I believe, my truest vocation. I will go on writing through fatigue, through frustration, fighting against all kinds of complications. I will give up sleep before I give up writing. But reading for pleasure? Reading for my own edification? Reading for the good of my physical, mental, and spiritual health?
I need to be reading. I need to read beautiful, inspiring, challenging work. I need to regularly explore a wide range of genres. I cannot grow as a writer unless I grow first as a reader. And if I am not always challenging myself to read things that are unfamiliar or more sophisticated than things I have read in the past, I will suffer as a writer, as a thinker, as a human being. I will stop growing. I want to be a better writer; thus, I need to be a better reader.
Anne and I read aloud together frequently, covering a chapter once or twice a week. We’re particularly fond of novels. We’ve read a lot of Kate DiCamillo and Sara Zarr books together. Recently, we’ve worked our way through sections of nonfiction work by Marilynne Robinson and Nick Cave. But this is a slow process: We tend to start reading when we are very tired, and pretty soon one of us is asleep. (Sometimes we discover later that the reader covered several pages after the listener fell asleep, which means we have to backtrack and start again.) It can take several months for us to finish a book together.
Since I have at least one more year of teaching classes ahead of me—and hopefully many, many more (but given the rate at which higher education in America is crumbling, who knows?)—I am looking for strategies that will help me make reading a priority again, and energize my efforts to do so.
One way might be to launch a series of posts, here at Give Me Some Light, about reading. “Light Reading,” we could call them. Rare as they may be, these posts might be about what I’m reading, and what I’m noticing in what I read. I get a charge out of sharing with you anything that I’m excited about. So, if I build in a sharing component to my reading process, that might give me more energy, more willpower.
So, here we go. Let’s start with something short, something we can all find a copy of, something we can consider together.
Get yourself a copy of Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse. Let’s talk about the first page. Maybe I’ll come back to it, or maybe next time I’ll bring up a different book. We’ll see how it goes. If I hear from a lot of readers, either in the Comments or in direct messages, about this post, I’ll probably post about this book again.
Whatever the case, let’s get back to that opening line:
“Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind.”
When I read that line, I feel the spark that I need to feel to keep reading. Usually, I need something more specific, something that really grabs my attention. But here, I like the mystery and the playful irony of the line. It announces that this is a writer who enjoys the craft of sentence-making.
What’s more—I feel like this might be a book that will give me hope. And I need hope in these dark days. This sentence tells me that “the End” is “on everyone’s mind.” But it also suggests that we have not reached the End. Not yet. Something might surprise whomever “everyone” might be. And we can tell, from the size of this novel, that there will be a decent amount of story before the End, if the End is to come at all.
And then there’s that little phrase in the middle, words that might go unnoticed but that feel to me like the most urgent, the most important, in the sentence: it must be said. What must be said? The End was on everyone’s mind.
Why must that be said? Why is it so important to say that? Is it because they (whoever they are) will find that they are right, and that the End they are anticipating will indeed arrive? Or is it because they are going to be surprised, and learn otherwise? Is it important, perhaps, for us to note everyone’s pessimism so that we’re set up to be delighted?
If I have a premonition of hope. For while they are thinking of the End, they are, we’re told, at the beginning. Of something. What are we at the beginning of? I can’t wait to find out.
One question that stays with me about this opening sentence has to do with typesetting.
The format of the book capitalizes the first four words of each chapter’s first line. And that leaves me with a question: Did the author capitalize beginning the way he did end? Who knows? The formatting makes that a mystery. But it seems important to me. Is the beginning that our narrator mentions here of the same magnitude as the End that is apparently on everyone’s mind?
What I admire about this page:
As I reach the end—note, the lowercase end—of the first page of I Cheerfully Refuse, I already have a lot to think about. Even better, I’m enjoying so much already.
The efficient establishment of a place: moonless and cold, wind droning in the eaves, waves on Superior standing up high and ramming into the seawall.
And then the assurance that we are a part of this story with the narrator and the others, and that we can actually feel what’s happening. Consider this: Lark and I lived two blocks off the water and you could feel those waves in the floorboards. Notice the power of “you” in that line. You could feel those waves in the floorboards. Yes, I do feel them!
And I find I want to read these lines aloud: I like the alliteration: the licorice feeling of Lark and I lived. There’s even more licorice in Labrino . . . like a lunatic.
And I like the assonance of two blocks off the water. (You know what assonance is, yes? It’s about vowel sounds that match: “blocks,” “off.”
A thrill of something that might be menacing, or at least mysterious: a character first identified as knocking violently, and raising his knuckles. A slumping hairy silhouette right outside your house. There’s something in this, an ominous premonition, like the last lines of “The Second Coming”:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
This opening makes me just anxious enough.
But what follows reminds me of something I read in a long time ago about David Lynch and Twin Peaks. (If you know where I read this, tell me!)
In an early scene of that show, Lynch shows the audience a long and empty corridor. He knows that audiences have been conditioned to feel fear at this sight. We are uncertain and anxious about what will come at us from the end of the corridor. Something terrible will emerge from the blur and the shadow at the far end. But then, two figures appear at the end of the hallway—a man in a suit and a man in a sheriff’s uniform—and they shake hands, and start walking toward the camera. We are startled, but immediately set at ease. We now must reckon with the possibility that something good, something kind, something orderly and respectful might be there, at the end of that long corridor.
Over the course of this brief opening chapter in Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse, we are immediately made a little anxious. But just a little. And then, slowly, and with care, we are shown something good, something kind, something orderly and respectful. Our narrator reaches out to offer kindness to someone carrying heavy burdens. (Perhaps there’s an echo of Les Misérables here?) And we come away having received a gift of warmth and hospitality.
What an unexpected thing to receive from an opening chapter.
What a way to give me a desire to keep reading.