Dynamic Reading

Robert Duvall as Boo Radley

I remember reading it for the first time while lying on the porch swing. I don't know if the image of light, filtered by the canopy of the swing, on the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird is real or imagined, but I do know that I loved the hours spent reading it. I remember closing the book and just laying there thinking. More importantly I remember I was changed by it. It was one of those changes I didn't know how to talk about. Like the character Jem, I turned inward with my thoughts, knowing I was different, but not knowing how, not knowing what to do with my new knowledge, my new self.

I just finished it for the fourth time. The circumstances around my completion were hardly so picturesque. I was on my bed, my desk was cluttered, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor. But closing the book caused the same reaction. I just laid there thinking, knowing I was once again changed.

I still don't completely know how to talk about how this book moves and changes me each time I read it, I think I will always be like Jem in that way. But it does. I think the thing I gained from it the most this time was the virtue and value of sight.