[In our youth we read] under the influence of innocence. We turn an important corner in life when we read under the influence of knowing.
All can agree that years of life provide each reader a store of experiences. We develop a consciousness about the deeper meanings of life, change, resistance, persistence, death and much more. To read “The Call of the Wild” today is to read a classic through this glass of experience, through all that life and history has thrown our way.
For us today, London’s masterpiece becomes a fresh, engaging book of ideas as well as a story of adventure with a satisfying resolution. Our maturity transforms the story of Buck into something broader and deeper. Can you read the following passage with attention and not be brought up short?
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, . . .”So be forewarned. Reading or re-reading Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” through your life’s own personal prism, with honesty and curiosity, is not an exercise for the timid. Reading deeply never is.
Full Terre Haute Tribune Star column here.
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