Feeding the wolf
LINDA DENICOLA My Take
Some people are voracious readers and I happen to be one of them. Right now on my night table, I have five books and two art magazines.

The books are a novel by John Updike, about an elderly female artist being interviewed for an article; a memoir by Peter Manseau, subtitled "The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son"; and three nonfiction books, "The Left Hand of God" by Rabbi Michael Lerner; "Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama; and Lee Iacocca's book, "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?"

As I'm writing this list, I am surprised by the fact that all of the authors are men. As an English lit major in the 1970s, my assigned reading was almost exclusively what feminists like to call the "dead white men," with the exception of a few female writers like Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley and the poet Adrienne Rich. So when I finished my degree program, I decided that I would only read books written by women. Since there were so many wonderful books by female authors, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Carol Shields, Annie Dillard, to name a few, I spent years catching up before I stopped focusing on literature written by one gender and just picked books that I thought might be excellent.

Unfortunately, right now I am limited by the rather small, but growing, selection of largeprint books that I find in the library.

I didn't grow up in a literary family surrounded by books, but I read the few that we owned and remember every one of them. There was a set of Pearl Buck's China novels, "Black Beauty," "Little Women," and a two-volume set on World War II with graphic photos that scared the 5-year-old me when I found the coffee table books hidden in a closet.

I guess my parents did not want me to see them. My father, who was a salesman, won the Pearl Buck books as well as the World War II set hidden in the closet. As is often the case with children, I never told my parents about finding the books and I never spoke to them about the disturbing images.

They stayed with me all of these years and are probably why I often have bodies hidden in my artwork. I have also tried to let go of the images by writing poems about them, but it doesn't work because wars don't go away and I am constantly reminded of the pictures in those books when I see the images of war and genocide today, whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan, Darfur, Israel, Pakistan or Zimbabwe.

For the most part, I read to learn things about other cultures, other lives, other ways of seeing the world. And if it is entertaining, it's a bonus.

Sometimes enlightenment comes from unexpected sources. While reading a novel about modern life, I read something that stopped me in my tracks. One of the characters in the novel tells this simple, yet profound, story. A Navaho grandfather is talking with his grandson. He tells the boy that he has two wolves at war within him. One is full of anger, resentment, cynicism, and the other is full of joy, good will and love.

"Which of the wolves will win?" the boy asks.

The grandfather responds, "The one

that I feed."

There is a wolf in me. She is fighting to feed the better side, sometimes successfully, and less often (I hope), unsuccessfully. And I might add, the times that I have been unsuccessful are the times that keep me awake at night, unable to sleep because thinking in narrow, selfish, cruel, or thoughtless ways makes me feel ashamed and anxious.

My wolf, which I call by my middle name, Belle, struggles daily to remain open-minded, open-hearted and fearless. That's why she reads books by clearsighted people who speak truth to [those in] power and to themselves.

Which brings me to another phrase in another book, one of Shakespeare's plays that I read in college, "King Lear." I can't remember the line verbatim but one of the characters - it may have been the fool who was anything but a fool, says of the aging, deluded king - one should not grow old before one grows wise.

I guess that is another reason why I read so much. The wolf is always hungrily curious.

- Linda DeNicola is a former staff writer for Greater Media Newspapers.