They Made Me Weep

An interesting post here on books that make readers weep.  The responses are all by women, a fact which is ok by me except that those responses may suggest implicitly that men don’t cry over books.  The truth is, we do.  “Flowers For Algernon,” the short story by Daniel Keyes, made me weep in eighth grade.  A Tale of Two Cities broke me down when I reached the sacrifice of Sydney Carton in the ninth grade.  I wept, and still weep, at several places in The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf’s fall into Shadow; Galadriel’s rejection of the One Ring, even though it means her doom and the doom of the Elves (“I pass the test; I will remain Galadriel, and go into the West”); Frodo’s farewell to Middle-Earth.  I did not weep, but fully understand why others did weep, over many passages in A Little Life.  Jude St. Francis needed a lot more tough love from his friends than he got, but I felt–oh, Lord, I felt–enormous sympathy for Harold and Julia, who gave every last ounce of strength they had in trying to show Jude what goodness is, and trying to show him how much goodness he had in himself.

The question is, why do we weep?  The answers are pretty simple, and it’s best not to overthink them.  We weep because the book or the story shows us one of three things:  how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the world can be, or how far away we are from achieving the world we want to live in.  This last possibility is important:  there is a terrible beauty in books like On The Beach and The Road, and it is part of the storyteller’s skill to take us, if he will, to the darkest places of our thought and help us survive our sojourn there.

Some of the best storytelling, of course, doesn’t happen in books.  It happens in movies and on television, although more plots in cinema than you might think are taken from published novels.  Two stories that have always stirred me deeply because of the perfection of their presentation are Charlton Heston in Will Penny (1968), especially the long final scene he shares with Joan Hackett:  all that a good man might show of love and fear and hopelessness is there, and it breaks my heart; and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from season five called “The Inner Light.”  Capt. Picard gets a chance to live the life of a man from a long-dead civilization.  No one understands how the episode works, but it does, and the psychological depth the writers manage to achieve within those forty-eight minutes is nothing short of astounding.  I’ve seen it many times, and I always cry for the utter rightness of it all.

[Postscript:  I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right:  I didn’t mention any books by women in the post.  Well, Hana Yanagihara, but who else?  Surely, there must have been  some novel by a woman that made me bust out crying.  And there is. . . there are.  I love, love, love the final section of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds and the reunion of Rainer and Justine.  I cry for the “rightness” of it, ’cause Justine (who is, in her own way, as “bad scared” as Will Penny is when he realizes he loves Cath Allen) finally understands that Rainer’s love for her is the real deal.  Sula, by Toni Morrison, is as perfect a novel as any author wrote anywhere at any time.  I put it in that class of novels that take us to the dark places of our thoughts and back again but not without the blurred vision that comes from having our lives shattered.  Others?  I feel almost silly in saying how much I love Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, but neither of them has moved me to tears.  Katherine Dunn in Geek Love (1990) has done it, but few others.

Why?  Because it takes a genuine talent to move any of us to tears.  For me, it takes someone who can strip away all my pretenses and show me myself in a way I can recognize.  I did not cry for Jude St. Francis because I haven’t suffered in the way that he has.  I have suffered in the way that Harold and Julia do.  It also might take some writer willing and able to create (or recall) a context out of which that moving material must come.  One of the reasons we love “The Inner Light” so much is the story picks up the main threads of Picard’s own life, threads that were present in the series’ first episode:  he never had a woman of his own, but he’s got a wife here; he never felt at ease with children on board the Enterprise because he led the Away team mission upon which Wesley Crusher’s father was killed.  But he’s got children and grandchildren as he lives this other life and, as he’s living it, he cannot imagine life without them.  He retains the knowledge and the memory of that experience when he is returned to himself on the Enterprise.

These are the qualities that must be present for me to be moved emotionally.  Relatively few writers, men or women, can move me.  The last woman who did so (other than Yanagihara) was Elizabeth Gilbert in The Signature Of All Things, a novel that leaves some readers cold but that I thought was first-rate.]