A friend of mine introduced me to Denis Johnson a couple years ago (Jesus’ Son, an amazing and wrenching collection of short stories), and he became one of my favorite writers. This morning I read a bit of an article by Lorin Stein on Paris Review about Johnson’s work, and the writing was gorgeous. Stein wrote:

Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. Your blood quickens, the clouds stretch, the light turns everything to gold and something enters you, shakes you, seizes some root of your soul and pulps it. Maybe you make your way down to the lake for a swim, or just sit beneath the sky for an hour, dazzled, but what lasts is the feeling that you have found something important, something precious, something that would be world-renowned if only it weren’t so hard to find.

It’s a proprietary feeling, too, when you find a place—or a song, or a painting, or a sandwich—that you love, that moves you. You want to share it with only a few other souls, believers, maniacs, folks who won’t trample on it. Because who wants to see her sacred meadow flattened by the sandals of tourists?

I first read Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” in a bright orange 2002 issue of The Paris Review and felt that old thrill of discovery … It’s a love story, a hermit’s story and a refashioning of age-old wolf-based folklore like “Little Red Cap.” It’s also a small masterpiece. You look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed.

YES. He captured so perfectly the experience I constantly seek in movies and books, the experience of being moved and changed and never quite the same.  On Sundays, I always seem to crave a movie that will do this to me, and I’m usually thoroughly disappointed (though this weekend I very much enjoyed Thomas Merton: A Film Biography (netflix streaming) and Edge of Dreaming (netflix streaming)). But you know what I mean, don’t you — that jarring experience of reading or watching something that just takes you to the depth of what’s important? That moves you away from the silly, the unimportant, the trivial?

When I was a young girl, I had a hard time. A very hard time. I was that too-smart, unkempt girl on the front row, the one who always had her homework, who always made the top grade, who read a bit too much, who was awkward and strange, who was without exception the last choice in PE, the one who made the chooser groan. Surprise! — I was unpopular. This caused me a lot of anguish and I decided that one way I might be liked was if I were dumb. So I tried very hard to fail, to at least make Bs, to “forget” my homework now and then (isn’t that sad?!). But I never could succeed at failing, so I just hid my mind and played it down, acted dumb whenever possible. Suffered fools gladly, by acting like I was one, too.

I never really got over that tendency, though I am trying very hard. Marnie takes herself and her work seriously, a trait I admire very much especially since she does it without taking herself too seriously, if you know what I mean. So when I read things that scoot me over inside myself, or watch movies like the two I watched this weekend, I remember a little more clearly that I am the deeper one hidden inside, much more than I am the foolish one I often pretend to be.