An epiphany isn’t always heralded by trumpets or bolts of lightning. I once had a flash of clarity while unlocking my bike: As if I had also unlocked my mind, I suddenly knew that I had to end the relationship I was in. It was one of those rare moments when you face a truth you’ve been avoiding or see life from a new perspective. The resulting vision isn’t always pretty (I started crying as soon as I got on my bike), but it sparkles with lucidity.
Predicting what will snap you into awareness like this is hard, but one of the joys of reading is encountering someone else’s awakening on the page. Their understanding may gather slowly over the course of the book, or the clouds may suddenly part. You may be one step ahead of a character and itching for them to catch up, or you may be stunned right along with them.
The eight books below chronicle various kinds of life-changing insights—spiritual, moral, political. They are brought about by far-flung journeys, traumatic experiences, and, in one case, exile to Siberia. Each provides a model for how to see with new eyes, as Marcel Proust once said. Although there’s no guarantee that reading about someone else’s epiphany will catalyze your own, the power of these stories may just be enough to spark your next revelation.
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s 1977 novel—her third, and the one that really established her literary reputation—is centered on Milkman Dead, a young man living in the Midwest and feeling lost and rudderless. Inspired by a family legend about a buried bag of gold, he leaves home and embarks on a classic hero’s journey, though his is set within the cultural frame of the Black American experience. As Milkman moves deeper into the South, reversing his family’s migration, he encounters figures both mythic and prosaic and defends himself against mortal dangers. Gradually, he realizes that he’s searching not for the treasure, but for clues to his own identity. The novel reads a bit like a detective story: Milkman must piece together scraps of nursery rhymes, local folk tales, mysterious place-names, and riddles. In the glorious moment when he finally succeeds, he is freed from his illusions about himself and his history. Morrison’s gorgeous prose makes you want to leap along with him, “as fleet and bright as a lodestar,” into the clear, sweet air of self-knowledge.
Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This slim, fabular novel, published in 2021, is set in a small Irish village in the 1980s, though its Dickensian overtones and depiction of Irish provincial life make it feel like it could be the 1890s. Bill Furlong, who “had come from nothing,” is now a successful coal merchant and a decent family man raising five daughters. But his goodness hasn’t been tested until he stumbles upon a desperate girl living in a so-called Magdalene laundry, a Catholic home where prostitutes, unwed mothers, and other “fallen women” are forced to work as laundresses under abusive conditions. On a freezing-cold Christmas Eve, Furlong is faced with a choice that pits his conscience against his family, his church, and the whole village. Keegan shows us a man turning toward his higher self, at first by degrees and then in a sudden rush. This little story runs deep enough to shake the foundations of our adherence to social niceties, forcing us to question what we can do to actually improve the lives of others.
Children of the Arbat, by Anatoly Rybakov, translated by Harold Shukman
Rybakov was staunchly loyal to the new regime in postrevolutionary Russia, until he was arrested by Stalin’s secret police and sent to a Siberian gulag for three years. His political disillusionment is recounted in this semi-autobiographical novel, which, because of its anti-Stalinist bent, had to be printed in installments by samizdat (a clandestine network of underground publishers). The title refers to a fashionable Moscow neighborhood, where girls stroll “up and down arm-in-arm, whiling away the time,” donning “the Autumn chic of the Arbat.” The local engineering student Sasha and his friends are eager young members of the Communist Party, but paranoia and misinformation in the higher ranks lead to his arrest and exile, robbing him of his health and youth, and shattering his ideals. A Ukrainian acquaintance told me that nearly everyone in the former U.S.S.R. has read this book (the first of a trilogy), but its fame in the United States seems much more modest. The time might be ripe for Sasha’s travails to rouse Americans from our own political complacency.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
Angelou’s beloved 1969 memoir is an intimate growing-up story, unfolding first in her grandmother’s house in the “musty little town” of Stamps, Arkansas, then in St. Louis and San Francisco, where she and her brother are sent to live with their glamorous, high-rolling mother. Angelou’s story reveals the effects of racism, sexism, and poverty on her young psyche; the marvel is how she nonetheless continues to insist on her personhood and dignity. When 8-year-old Angelou is sexually abused, she falls silent for a while, and the rest of the memoir is largely the story of her recovering her voice and awakening to its power. An avid reader, she is advised by one of the strong women in her life: “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.” Angelou’s very ability to tell her harrowing story so beautifully—along with the fact that she went on to become such an important figure in American letters—is a testament to the potency of speaking our truth.
By Maya Angelou
The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
The book that some consider to be Maugham’s greatest, published in 1944, tracks the intersecting lives of a group of friends, all coolly observed by an alter ego of the author. At the center of the story is Larry Darrell, a wounded war veteran who abandons his fiancée, Isabel, and forgoes conventional success in order to embark on a spiritual quest. After several years in India studying with Vedic mystics, he becomes a kind of faith healer, realizing that he is “able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear.” The narrator is skeptical of some of these claims, but throughout the book, Larry’s relentless seeking and life of service are set against the material preoccupations of the other characters, including Isabel, who ends up marrying a millionaire businessman, and Elliott, a successful art dealer and a dissipated rake. Larry’s story represents a more enlightened path, and suggests that we have the capacity for a deeper kind of joy. “Nothing in the world is permanent,” Larry tells the narrator, “and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude
Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis in middle age, turning away from the Russian Orthodox Church and embracing what he saw as the key teaching of Christ: compassion. He renounced his prior works of fiction, including Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as amoral, and concentrated his literary powers on stories that conveyed his newfound understanding. Luckily for us, because he was Tolstoy, these stories, including the 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, are far from didactic. Ivan Ilyich is an official of the law courts whose life, which is coming swiftly to a close, has been “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” As his illness progresses, he becomes more self-pitying, harping on how little he deserves his suffering. But at the final hour, he has a sudden conversion, a mirror of Tolstoy’s own, that changes his attitude toward himself, toward others, and toward death itself. Tolstoy strives to transmit the true meaning of life to his readers, so that we don’t have to wait until we’re on our deathbed to know it.
The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
When The Enchanted April was first published, in 1922, it became a best seller in both England and the U.S. and inspired not only film and theatrical adaptations but also a rash of trips to Italy. (We might think of this as a precursor to the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon.) The novel describes four women who feel compelled to spend the month of April together in Portofino. The plot is set in motion when the self-effacing, awkward Lotty Wilkins sees an ad in a newspaper on a rainy winter day in London, addressed to “Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” and has a eureka moment: She should rent the advertised house. She manages to convince three more women—an acquaintance from her ladies’ club and two strangers she scrounges up—to join her. Later, thanks to a month spent among sea and sun and flowering vines and cypress trees, the women all have various epiphanies of their own, returning to forgotten selves and admitting their true desires, in life and in love. The novel is a reminder that sometimes you have to go far away from home to come home to yourself. (It’s also a reminder to visit Italy in the springtime.)
Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley
Each of the six essays in the Canadian filmmaker and actor Polley’s 2022 collection is a sharp examination of the way we process pain and trauma. You might marvel that one person has endured so much: severe scoliosis, sexual assault, near-fatal childbirth. One essay, “Mad Genius,” describes how, as a child actor on the set of a Terry Gilliam film, she was subjected to special effects that terrified her (“I sobbed in my father’s arms between takes and begged him to intervene”) and was hospitalized after an explosive detonated next to her and caused her to briefly lose her hearing. Each essay contains well-earned realizations—concerning the mind and the body, time and healing—but the title essay, about a debilitating concussion, relays the most resonant insight. A doctor tells Polley that the only way to return to normal brain function is, counterintuitively, to do the things that scare her most, to “run towards the danger”; this becomes the organizing principle of her life, even after her recovery. In a voice that is both warm and unflinchingly honest, she invites her reader to consider doing the same—to turn fear into a conduit for fulfillment.
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