“Books saved my life,” writes Kevin Powers, a novelist and veteran of the war in Iraq in a recent New York Times column (6/16/18), though he is not sure how they did. “Utterly adrift” since participating “in the fiasco that was the war in Iraq,” Powers was regularly drinking himself into a drunken stupor. “The only human contact I had,” Powers writes, “were the brief words I exchanged with the cashier as she rang up two 12 packs, two big bite hot dogs and two packs of smokes. That was my life, and I wondered if I deserved the name.”

One day, he picked up The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas and found these lines:

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.

“Crudities, doubts and confusions” — “nothing came as close to characterizing what my life had become as those three words. I was, I thought, crudity, doubt and confusion personified,” writes Powers. He concludes:

 . . . over the following months, the tether to the world outside my mind was made stronger by other books, until I came to the belief that the whole range of human experience, including suffering and pain, when witnessed or shared, could be transformed into a kind of transcendent awe. In a strange way, the same impulse that led me toward self-destruction — the desire to erase the self — was still at work in my life. What changed was that I started to see immersion in a book as a reliable alternative to drink or death.

I have sometimes heard art described as anything created without discernible utility, but my experience tells me otherwise. I have found books to be profoundly and incomparably useful in my life, for they helped me hold on to it.

Thank you, Kevin Powers, for reminding me that every time I walk into my home and look ANYwhere, I see shelves and shelves and piles and piles of grace that has helped me to hold onto life.