"Books As Memories: Rereading HIS DARK MATERIALS"

by Aimee Griffin 

During my second pandemic phone session with my therapist, I tell her that I feel like I have too much time to think, that I’m getting caught up in memories that I haven’t traversed in a while, mostly those of the painful variety. As someone who masochistically loves a mental spiral as much as anyone, I make a large effort to avoid starting one, because I can drag it out for days, and then when it’s nearly over I berate myself for wasting my mental energy. Things like reminiscing and nostalgia require me to slog through feelings, potentially difficult ones, and who wants to do that kind of emotional work? My therapist says that there once was a time that too much time to think had been dangerous for me, but exploring things you have distance from, and wisdom to better analyze, isn’t really so bad.

While my days are restricted to my home during quarantine, I have more time than I’m used to. Since the future seems so uncertain, my mind drifts easily backward. My angst levels are high; I’ve been filling up journals at the same rate and quantity I used to when I was young and had lots of feelings that I didn’t know how to express. Faced with a very real threat of a devastating virus of such magnitude I can barely wrap my brain around it, I find myself searching out the kinds of things that soothed me in childhood, when every emotion felt like a burden, particularly books full of fantasy and adventure that I can immerse myself in.

A book or books that you once loved isn’t quite the same thing as a painful memory, but for me, rereading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman felt similarly unapproachable because it had direct ties to a past iteration of myself. I think I read the series for the first time I was in middle school, because I distinctly remember arguing with a friend I sat with during lunch in 5th or 6th grade about the pronunciation of the word “subtle” when discussing the second book (if you’re wondering, I vehemently argued that the b was not silent, and continued even after I realized I was wrong). That was around the time of my first depressive episode, when books were truly an escape from feelings I didn’t understand. I finished the series sitting at the kitchen table in the house I grew up in, and I cried, which I don’t believe had ever happened with a book before. My heart was broken because Will and Lyra could not be together; they had big jobs to do and unselfish choices to make. This past summer I bought myself a copy of the trilogy, inspired to reread it because I wanted to watch the new HBO series that everyone was raving about, but not before refreshing my memory and privately revisiting the characters and places I had loved so much. The book then sat for eight months, untouched.

I’m not a person who tends to reread books—a tenet of snobbery I developed sometime in adolescence. Trusted friends assured me that Pullman’s series held up, but I was skeptical. Underlying my bravado around not rereading childhood favorites is my fear of discovering that maybe something I once loved is not so wonderful after all. What if I shattered my illusions about something that had brought me joy when so little else could? When TV binges and video games started losing their luster in quarantine, I realized I could run away from the books like I did from old memories, but then I’d never get to unpack what they meant to me. So I began.

I remembered immediately why I loved the story, why I had held the books in my heart for so many years. In The Golden Compass Lyra’s world mixes elite academia with magic and fantasy, and everything is tactile and intoxicating, from the crackling fires, rare honey colored wine, the freezing arctic landscapes, and the luxurious furs that the adults wear. Pantalaimon, her dæmon, is like every child’s imaginary friend brought to life but better, because he is her soul incarnate, helping her to navigate a dangerous world while slipping between various adorable animal forms. Most importantly, Lyra is a dirty, poorly behaved, whip-smart little girl who manages to teach some very intelligent adults a thing or two. I know I must have wanted to be Lyra when I read the book before–I still want to be her now. She is a beautifully imperfect main character; her recklessness and arrogance get her into trouble sometimes, but her empathy for others and quick thinking usually manage to save the day, or at least win over someone who can. Her flaws are part of what make her a relatable enough to fall in love with as a reader, and her world is familiar but not, easy to slip into.

In The Subtle Knife, Lyra meets Will and together they move between worlds thanks to a magical knife that can slice windows in space and time. Often they travel through Cittágazze, a place of limbo plagued by Spectres that eat the souls of adults, but whom children cannot see. The Spectres came from another world through a window carelessly left open by some former warden of the subtle knife. While in The Golden Compass Lyra had been excited for her father, Lord Asriel, to open a window to a new world and take her with him into it, we learn with her that hopping from one plane of existence to another is actually complicated and dangerous.

I’m sure there are lessons in there—about life, about reading, about anything you want, really— but I can’t tell you what they are, because I haven’t gotten to the end yet. I’m remembering how to wander through the pages of a book again, reading a few chapters before bed, or when I have a few hours to kill. I forgot how nice that is. Over the years, reading has become something other than the escape I used to love; I’ve read for school; I’ve read to achieve some bullshit level of intellectual relevance; most recently, as I’ve worked to get more of my own writing out into the world, I’ve read to understand what other writers were doing. Meanwhile, in the long slow shouldering of mundane adult responsibilities, I forgot that I could read simply for pleasure. Sheltering at home has given me not only the time to revisit an old favorite, but the mental space to alter my relationship with reading itself.

I started the trilogy again because I needed to get away, if only in my own mind. What I didn’t predict was that loving these books again would remind me to have love for the 10-year-old me who’d read the books before, and the difficult experiences that felt very big to her. Lyra and Will have reminded me that it’s okay to open a window to a world from the past and walk around in it, to really live in it, so long as you remember to come back, and close it behind you.

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Aimee Griffin is a Brooklyn-based, Jersey-born writer who recently had her first fiction piece published at delayfiction.org. In 2012, her essay on the ethics of medical developments won third prize in the Elie Wiesel Foundation's Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. She is a Marketing Manager for Taylor & Francis and is currently working on a novel and short stories.