One way to measure a book's worth is to see how well the author gives the reader a compelling sense of place. In two books I read recently, the geographies were vividly pictured. Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient The English Patient (New York: Vintage International, 1993). paints landscapes—the hills of Tuscany, the North African desert—that the reader can almost taste as well as see. Howard Frank Mosher's A Stranger in the Kingdom A Stranger in the Kingdom (New York: Dell Publishing, 1989). evokes Vermont's Northeast Kingdom region as a place that, true to my own experience, can be both familiar and strange, beautiful and harsh. These books offer word pictures that make me want to know these terrains on foot.
During the same period that I was reading these two books, I also read Mary Baker Eddy's Miscellaneous Writings, a book I'd often read from over the years but never read cover to cover. This book, first published a century ago, is a collection of Mrs. Eddy's articles (most of them originally published in this magazine), addresses, poems, and letters written between 1883 and 1896. Those weren't comfort years for the woman whose discoveries in Christian metaphysics were sending shockwaves through the ranks of science, theology, and medicine. Within the ranks of her own newly born evangelical movement she also faced organized opposition, directed hatred, defections. They were years of major achievement, yet at times it must have been for her a solitary road.
Reading Miscellaneous Writings became for me an intentional journey. I found myself stopping often to take in a new view of some familiar concept or event, or to wrestle with a statement that challenged a personal comfort zone. At several points I paused to treasure what a particular passage had meant to me and to my wife at times when we needed to alter the course of our lives or when one of us was in need of healing.
