It will be a dark and stormy night.
A hurricane.
A calm in the storm: Reading by candlelight
The Washington Post's Anqoinette Crosby learns what you should have on hand to prepare your family for a hurricane from Cheryl Kravitz, Director of Communications for the American Red Cross.
The Washington Post's Shyamantha Asokan reports from Elizabeth City, N.C. where Hurricane Irene has made landfall. (Aug. 27)
Your graffiti art photos
With books.
“Oh, my goodness,” says Alice Ozma. “I think that the biggest thing that the Red Cross left off their emergency-preparedness list is as many library books as you can check out.” Ozma is an author whose debut memoir, “The Reading Promise,” recounts reading with her father. “It’s hunkering down, letting those sounds wash over you, and there’s a blanket,” ideally a patchwork quilt.
This weekend, as most of the Eastern Seaboard prepares for a watery wallop, as everyone else brawls over nonperishables in Giant, bookworms are preparing to live out a deep and soulful dream. A Laura Ingallsesque dream. A dream that involves hot chocolate and fuzzy slippers, and showcasing one’s literary dedication by self-punishing one’s eyesight.
Reading. By. Candlelight.
“My idea of heaven,” says Elissa Miller, the associate director of collections for the District’s public library system, “is to just be stuck somewhere. Stuck for an extended period of time.” She cites being stranded for 24 hours on a train in the high plains of Bolivia. She had a thousand-page book. It was marvelous.
The exquisite pleasure of reading in storms, reading under duress, reading via melting wax is not something that can be explained to someone who does not automatically understand the appeal of such an activity. One imagines that it is akin to the pleasure of baking on hot bleachers for a sports team, a ludicrous activity that sounds perfectly dreadful, though some people appear to enjoy it.
(The Victorian Trading Co., for example, understands the appeal: Its Web site sells a Sip & Read by Candlelight Bathtub Caddy, which includes a built-in bookrack, a candlestick and a holder for your wineglass.)
Candlelight reading is a fantasy that persists even though those who have tried it will attest that the act is not nearly as romantic as it sounds.
“First, the book absolutely has to be tipped up,” says Colin Beavan, a documentarian who lived without electricity for a year as part of his “No Impact Man” project. “And,” he advises, “the candle should be between you and the book, not off to the side; unless, of course, you have a candelabra. Then that’s a whole different situation.”
During their powerless year, Beavan and his wife spent many nights sitting at their kitchen table with candles and books or playing cards. “We say that televisions pull us apart, because we each have sets in our own room,” Beavan says. “But electric lights do the same thing. People used to have to gather together, around the light. The candlelight can pull us all together.”
Everything is cozier in candlelight. When the real world goes fuzzy, the world on the page grows sharper. When there is nothing else we should be doing — no vacuums can be run, no treadmills can be run upon — it is easier to retreat, guiltlessly, into reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the 27th time, spooning ice cream from the carton (it will melt, anyway) and watching words flicker on the page.
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