In the summer of 2017, I finished reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a book I had started back in March of that same year because a friend was writing about it.
I stalled out about 300 pages in once April hit, but in a rarity for me, I picked it back up at the beginning of July and sped through the last 200 pages.
I had been holding onto the novel for nearly twenty years.
Dr. Thayle Anderson assigned the novel to our American Novels class when I was sophomore, but I blew it off. However, I kept the novel despite having never read it, because my first serious girlfriend was in Dr. Anderson’s class with me and introduced herself to me under the auspices of talking about the novel, which she loved. Side note: I probably should have known the relationship was doomed when I didn’t even read the book.
As I finally began reading it nearly two decades after first receiving it, I thought it well-written, but underwhelming. All it took was an April crush, and I put it down.
But when I returned to it in July, I felt as if my eyes had been opened. I realized that it was about marriage and the tension of individual flourishing in the context of said marriage. The heroine, a 19th Century American woman, is constantly having to move for her husband’s career though she was every bit the artist/professional he was. The novel poignantly explores the shame and guilt that comes with trying to love your spouse when you don’t have any spiritual foundation for things like grace or forgiveness.
To have read this in the summer of 2017, the summer where my wife took a new gig and moved 3.5 hours away with our daughter, absolutely devastated me.
It made me realize that:
1) I was no more ready to read that book at 19 than I was when I was 10. It would have been lost on me.
2) I wasn’t even ready to read the book two months before.
3) Only through the peculiar circumstances I found myself in now with Britt was the book able to speak to me.
This is the kind of experience that I hold onto as a teacher: the possibility that something I assign may not matter for a student in the moment but may come back to them fifteen years later.
My friend and I call it the long game, and I want God-given patience to continue playing it as an educator and disciple.