I posted a comment back when I started this book about that euphoric feeling that comes when you discover a like mind and a shared language. Especially when it is a voice that has layed hidden in plain sight for all of these years. Partly, I’m sure, due to the association with Anne of Green Gables, books that I assumed as a young kid were great but wouldn’t be my thing. Emily of New Moon has me second guessing those assumptions, because it turned out I am a big fan of her writing.
Montgomery was put on my radar likely due to a sudden resurgence in interest. Having signed up to Kindle Unlimited for the Christmas season, as I typically do, this was one of the additional books that I happened across in my browsing. This led to me dusting off a copy of The Blue Castle, a $5 classic that has been sitting on my shelf for quite some time without getting read, and planning to delve into one of her biographies. It would be New Moon that would be the starting point of this journey. A story that I would define as a quiet sweeping epic with a pastoral concern. If epic feels misplaced here, I would argue that is only because its more an exercise in character and place than a plot driven spectacle. The book immerses us in Emily’s world, spending the generous page count moving with her through the ebb and flow of time as a young child navigating the stuff of loss and change, school and family, responsibilities and struggles. In terms of plotting, there’s not a whole lot here, so if that feels like it might frustrate you this might not be your thing. What we do get is a subtle movement, which for me even arrived as a kind of surprise, towards an exploration of coming of age against certain obstacles. A youung girl dealt a difficult hand finding ways to manage self doubts and personal passions while figuring out precisely what it means to respond to the systems and powers that afford her a sense of responsbility to the world around her.
This is a young kid with an astute awarness of a world the adults around her seem to have forgotten exists. A world their cynicsm has blinded them to. Emily describes her encounters with this world as “the flash,” that invading presence that disrupts her sense of routine of normalcy and disrupts her imagination. A thing that occupies her love of a walk, her sense of communing with the mysteries of the world around her, of writing and imagining and creating. Montgomery has her describe it this way;
“And for companions she had all the fairies of the countryside- for she could believe in them here- the fairies of the white clover and satin catkins, the little green folk of the grass, the elves of the young fir trees, sprites of win and wild fern and thistledown. Anything migh happen there- everything might come true.” (page 8)
As Emily suggests, to occupy this space is what awakens her need to remember it. “It would hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down.” (page 8) I felt so much affinity with this sentiment, my mind wandering to many a restless night as a young kid trying to figure out what to do with all of the thoughts rolling around in my head about the world I had encountered. I echo her feelings where “It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside- but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond- only a glimpse- and heard a note of unearthy music… and always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.”(page 9)
This becomes the foundation of a source of tension that follows Emily throughout her story, her world being upended by tragedy and her life being moved to New Moon. One of the real questions that permeates this movement between spaces is, does that imagination get left behind or does it occupy the wider world of all of our experiences regardless of the space we are occupying in a given moment. In Emily’s experience, she states emphatically, “How very big and empty the world had suddenly become. Nothing was interesting any more.” (page 26) Innocence lost. A fact that moves her to start to question the world the adults around her were handing her, wrestling with how to reconcile the truth of the flash with people’s descriptives of a God as the source of it and the simple, harsh facts about reality that continue to push back. Throughout her journey in the book Emily wrestles with the simple observation that who this God is seems intimately tied to the adults who define it. Hence she finds herself praying to the God of those persons whom she finds most true and most able to speak to the tensions she carries. This is something I also felt a deep resonance with, as to encounter God as a young kid for me was to encounter different conceptions of God whom were as broadly present as the different authors I was reading and encountering and the persons whom were demanding things of me. And yet, as Emily does, I was also intimately aware that something True must exist. The flash needed and demanded explanation. Perhaps this simple concession is how Emily comes to be able to say, “And now in this most unlikely place and time it had come- she had seen, with other eyes than those of sense, the wonderful world behind the veil.” (page31) A statement that doesn’t evoke certainty as much as a deeply felt sense of faith in this idea that the world could still make sense. Or more precisely in her words, “I don’t want to learn sense and be done a world of good to, I want somebody to love me.” This she finds in her father: “Nobody who was loved as much as he was could be a failure.” (page 44) As she declares, “If you knew Father’s God you’d believe in Him.” (page 123) This, it would seem, is how Emily “looked about her on her new environment and found it good,” sustained by this mysterious word love. This is where she comes to discover that she could write, an act that becomes one of her primary expressions throughout the book, in journals and lengthy letters where we get to occupy space in Emily’s mind and point of view as she meanders through all her thoughts in real time.
A moment that brings new opportunities. “Her world had conceded her standing. But now other things had to be thought of. The storm was over and the sun had set…. Life tasted good to her again- tasted like more.” (page 124. 150) Where she can look upon the world and say, “I think God is just like my flash, only it lasts only a second and He lasts always.” (page 170) Where “everything Emily had ever read of dream and myth and legend seemed a part of the charm… She was filled to her finger-tips with a rapture of living.” (page 243) Where the very thoughts she affords her Father begin to trickle back in observations about this finnicky, stubborn resistant and yet authentic and impassioned young girl- “I’ve never seen a creature who seemed so full of sheer joy in existence.” (page 292) But in this comes the tension filled reality of this journey- these words break into an entire world of words stating otherwise. Definding her in other terms. Which brings her to an incredibly important observation: “To love is easy and therefore common- but to understand- how rare it is.” (page 293) This hit me hard, as all my life I have carried this deeply rooted fear about being misunderstood. Here I think Emily opened up a fresh understanding of this fear for me personally. The simple truth that this fear exists because we “can’t believe in fairies” alone. That is the existential crisis. To have this awareness of the world so deeply rooted inside of you, to need to find a way to communicate it preserve it before it gets stolen or lost or forgotten, and to have to do this in a world where this must and can only be done in relationship with others. No matter how much I am aware, my awareness only goes so far as knowing that it can be understood by someone else. And yet we seek to be understood, as Emily puts it, in a world caught up in the same cycle that we find in the story of Adam and Eve, a symbol and a picture that opens the book and closes the book and carries throughout the book. The symbol of these two trees that seem to contain the imposed judgments of others as persons standing between the trees seeking to pull from one or the other. On one side is true belief, on the other cynicism. And part of the awareness here is that to live in this world is for any, for all, to occupy this same space. The revelation here for Emily is this innate human tendency to need to see the other as the one who takes the apple, for as long its them we can imagine it is not us. The irony being that this is precisely how we blind ourselves to the Truth (the awarness of the flash) and bind ourselves to the cynicsm.
There’s a phrase too that comes along with this as Emily at one point is wrestling with the Truth of things. A wrestling that comes with the doubts begin to take over in the face of the reality of life’s struggles. The stuff, as it says, of our histories. “Do you know what makes history? Pain- and shame- and rebellion- and bloodshed and heartache… remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you- then some one else.” To become aware of this, as the sentiment goes, is to learn to be “content with fewer thrills.” This is part of the journey in this book, of knowing and learning what it is to enter into the gentle rhythms of a life, even as we grow up and, as Emily puts it, “certain doors of life get shut behind us and cannot be reopened.” To still see the world that the flash once revealed, the thing Emily states at the start of the journey that she remembers all her life, that’s what sustains one through the open doors that await.
The Stories of my Life 