A month or two after we brought Atticus home I realized all my mental escapes were gone.
There was no time to watch movies or read books for hours; there was precious little room for visits with friends. I'd quit playing bass at church a year ago when Atticus first went into the hospital.
The external input in my life had dwindled. I was going to work, coming home and taking care of Atticus, and going to work again. The lack of other spaces and people pressed in on me.
This is when I really turned to Emily Dickinson. I wanted to think about someone else's life and hers, the little I knew about it, was fascinating. I wanted to insert myself into it and look around. So I invented a new character in her story, a child that could shadow the great poet, to help me open up a door and look inside.
This idea still has an appeal to me. But after reading even a little of Robert Sewall's biography "The Life of Emily Dickinson," it seems like a waste of a chance to explore and re-imagine her actual, documented life.
What strikes me often is how fascinating she is to so many people. A quick scan of the literature explaining Emily Dickinson at the college where I work gives me almost two shelves worth of biographies, criticism and interpretation.
What is known about Emily Dickinson is based on poems that were found after her death, letters she's written to others, and personal accounts from documents of people who knew her. This would be like reconstructing your life from emails and texts you'd written to others, emails or texts which they'd kept because they liked you, or still happened to have them after they discovered you were famous.
So it's basically an educated guess at what the people were really like, what moved their hearts, and what drove them to make the decisions they made.
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