what books offer

"Although she had read it at least a dozen times she longed to lose herself in it tonight, to rest in Fowler's certainties or Pyle's innocence.  To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book."  Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters

Back to common-place book mode: I record this from a novel I'm in the midst of in between marking student papers on American democracy, or the synoptic gospels, or various aspects of American religious diversity.  Soli's lines would have struck me in any case, however.  I'm not drawn to them because I need her book as a balance for the papers.  Rather, I'm struck by how apt her observation is more generally. 

Helen, the she in these sentences, has only been in Viet Nam a few days at this point in the novel.  The war Americans call "the War in Viet Nam" is only beginning, though war in Viet Nam had been going on longer.  In the midst of her confusion and being overwhelmed by so much that was new and unexpected, reading a book she knew well was grounding, certain, reliable, predictable as her immediate experience was not.

Books can offer us this: a familiar world, a reassuring world, or at least, a world that stays still on the page long enough for us to get a good look at it.  This can be an escape, but it can also be the respite we need in order to return to our uncertain lives ready to act.