Desert Island Books - necessary distraction for an idle mind or life-saving resource?

Desert Island books

It was my birthday in March and my husband bought me a book case for the living room. I had been talking about getting a book case for some time. If there is one thing the past year has given me (and many of us) it's plenty of time to contemplate the big and small questions in life.  One of the quandaries that keeps returning to me in different ways is the question of  how to live best.  By this I mean, in this short time on earth, how should I spend my time and energy. This simple (not easy) question has taken me down many, many avenues - how should I eat, work, sleep, exercise, purchase, connect spiritually, seek pleasure, nurture my relationships? What in my life needs more nourishment and what needs to move to the metaphorical scrapheap? Or literal scrap heap? Or charity shop? There is a great pleasure in packing up all the material things accumulated hastily and thoughtlessly and removing them from one's living space. The trick is not to fill up the space again - easier said than done. One of our mini-experiments has been altering the tidying of the kitchen (not the most scintillating stuff) - less dishwasher, more hand washing. There can even be a strange meditative pleasure in cleaning the dishes at the kitchen sink - something I'm sure has been well enough documented by Thich Nhat Hanh and the likes. Maybe it is just system and routine that gives comfort. But there is also something in the ordinariness of a simple task that can free up the mind and leave space for one to think. However, space for thinking can be hard. How much of our lives are an attempt to avoid thinking and reflecting.  Before Christmas, I heard a young news correspondent talk about the relentlessness of working through the pandemic.  She talked about how wearing it has been, but interestingly, she also reflected on how much harder it was to take time off. I think many of us can relate - we use work, friendship, entertainment, the Internet, food, etc. to fill up all the spaces so that we don't have time to think.  Time for quiet and reflection can be intolerable. Contemplation and introspection about life and lack can be painful.   

Netflix has offered a welcome past-time in my house over the past year when there has been no possibility of eating out, visiting family or friends, or even venturing out of the local area.  But the solace that it brings has its limits. The bombardment of screen time in the form of zoom meetings, tv, and social media can have an agitating effect. I first noticed this about two years ago when I came home from work late, and completed a 10 minute mindful meditation as part of my stress response module on a HDip in Counselling and Psychotherapy.  I felt calm and grounded after the meditation, got ready for bed and settled in with my phone in hand. Half an hour later I found myself feeling tired and agitated and almost unable to contemplate putting down the phone and switching off the light.  This same feeling of agitation has visited me on occasions throughout the past year. At home, one of our other mini-experiments was to give up tv for a week. What would we do with tv-free evenings? Read, meditate, talk? Feeling the faintest hint of anxiety at the idea of cutting out tv for a week was the sign I needed to proceed with it. Certainly that week allowed for more reading, more chat, and more proper rest.  One challenge was to avoid replacing tv with phone time. YouTube and Instagram are notorious rabbit holes, and the latter have fine tuned the art of incredibly brief and absorbing videos to swallow minutes or even hours of your day.  Having a week free of tv allowed me to think more about the space and how we use it.  The living room (like most living rooms) has the tv occupying the main wall like it's some kind of idol (i.e., the wall that we point our furniture towards).  In the quiet, I realised I had a fantasy of a reading space in the living room. Fairly easy to create really - a book case and a tall lamp for reading in the evening.  My mum had told me about a visit to Hodges Figgis when I was 10 or 11 years of age. She found me sitting in a beanbag in the children's section reading something or other.  Just the idea of a quiet, comfortable place to read a good book without distraction is such a balm for the body, mind and soul, that it sounds like a total indulgence. 

Plenty of space still on our bookshelves

I've been ogling the book shelves of colleagues and students over Zoom meetings all year. So, cue the arrival of our book case. It's a simple (but lovely) Ash book case. My husband calls it a library rather than a bookcase. Somehow this makes me like it even more. It fits pretty snugly into a corner of the living room. Practically, this means our books are gathered in one place and on display, rather than scattered all over the house - beside the bed, in baskets, in presses and generally out of sight, neglected and forgotten.  Stacking the shelves, I realised that we have fewer books than I thought, but we also have 5 copies of the Bible (should be enough for now), several books waiting to be read, and a few books (cheeky stowaways) that neither of us remember buying or receiving.  Also, a book case feels like an invitation to peruse and pick something to read, even for just a few pages. For a while I worked as a 'shelver' in Trinity College Dublin Lecky library when I was a student. This involved fairly mundane sorting and shelving before the library opened each morning. But it was nice to work with nice people in a relaxed atmosphere. I often found myself neglecting the work, and getting absorbed in some obscure text.  This turned into a bit of a dream job over one summer, when I got to work in the archives of the old library in Trinity College.  The work was easy - number the items and store them. But, the beauty of it was that I was allowed to read as much as I liked while working.  The most historically valuable document I numbered was a letter to the college from Queen Elizabeth I.  But I also mainly worked on processing the archive of the author Jennifer Johnston which contained all sorts including childhood letters, baby hair, and drafts of plays and novels.  Every morning I got to walk through the old library on my way to my desk and it felt like a total treat to get this little bit of access to history. Any nerd can appreciate the musty smell of old books... right? The experience also made me love Trinity College with it's tradition and history.  I also got a rare insight into the valuable (and under-valued) work of librarians.  Over the years of adulthood my reading has waxed and waned.  My work requires a lot of reading within fairly narrow fields, and I have had to really create time for reading for it's own sake (if there is such a thing), sometimes relying on audio books during car journeys and walks to fill the gap. I'm not sure if this adequately replaces hard copies but that's another story. 

This morning I finished the (hard copy) book 'The Gift' by Holocaust survivor and Psychologist Edith Eger. Using her own experience, and the anecdotes from her work with clients, she considers how humans can overcome suffering, victimization and trauma.  It certainly helps one to think about the many ways we can find a path to recovery. Feeling very book-hungry after finishing this, I asked a few friends and family over WhatsApp to choose 3 books to take to a desert island and the responses I got were varied.  Everything from Mein Kampf to the Bible and Harry Potter were mentioned. Some people chose books with personal meaning - e.g., the first book that made them cry or introduced them to a new culture or genre.  Some chose books to help them cope - e.g., escapist novels with comforting nostalgia attached. Others selected inspiring texts, probably much needed  to survive on a desert island.  Solace, humour and familiarity were also justifications for choices (i.e., you'd need a laugh in those circumstances). The stoicism-inclined chose texts that would help them face their mortality (a desert island is a proper invitation to an existential crisis) and those with faith chose the Bible for comfort and connection. The pragmatists chose survival-orientated texts (think something along the lines of 'Bear Grylls for Dummies') and others (perhaps more literature-hungry?) picked works that they had not read yet and that would possibly keep them stimulated for a very long time (e.g., War and Peace, Encyclopedia Britannica). 

What we all look for in a book varies but seems to come down to one thing - something to occupy or exercise the mind in one way or another.  What if we were without books or distraction of any kind? The desert island might be too unbearable? Is a book enough to sustain us psychologically and spiritually?  Would we create some kind of Wilson in Castaway scenario? In Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning' he describes how the physically frail often survived imprisonment in the concentration camp longer than the physically robust if the former had the capacity for reflection / purpose / meaning and the latter lacked the same.  In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn writes about a group of intellectuals who "had reached the very brink of death ... worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And then they were deprived of sleep."  But they did not succumb to stealing or whimpering. Instead they use their personal time to hold seminars, each taking it in turns to deliver a (last) lecture from their own specialist field, while the numbers dwindled through death.  Can reading (and its associated learning) alone help to develop or inspire such resilience? Can it help foster a capacity for reflection or meaning in the worst circumstances? I'm not sure, but I do know that books of all kinds have gifted me a few nuggets that might help me to survive my own desert island. 

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I asked a few friends and colleagues to write their own take on what they gain from books and reading. Their thoughts can be found below:

Trish Frazer writes about the first books she exchanged with the man she would later marry - https://trishthinks.home.blog/2021/04/14/find-a-feeling-pass-it-on/

Aoife Lynam reflects on relationships, creativity and contemplation - https://issuesinpsychology.blogspot.com/2021/04/guest-blog-from-dr-aoife-lynam-desert.html

Kate Carr-Fanning discusses how her reading has changed depending on what has been going on in her life - https://issuesinpsychology.blogspot.com/2021/04/guest-blog-from-dr-kate-carr-fanning.html