Simone de Beauvoir wrote that novels are compelling to the degree that the characters in them actually seem free. Novels in which the reader has a sense that the characters have agency, make decisions, and aren’t mere instantiations of ideologies or “types” are better than novels in which characters follow predictably plotted paths. Of course, characters in a novel aren’t free – they’re printed words, contained between two covers – but, for Beauvoir, this illusion of freedom is what gives novels life. Raskolnikov is going to confess no matter who is reading Crime and Punishment, but for the specific, individual, first-time reader, Raskolnikov might, or he might not. The illusion of freedom, and the reader’s participation in this illusion, is what compels the reader, and allows him to participate in the process more fully.

In novels, as in youth, the sense that you can do anything feels exciting. A lack of certain knowledge of the future, the open possibility of myriad options, contributes to the sense that one is free. The future is not a wall, or even a path, but a door, many doors, scattered about, which lead to unknown places, through which a man can enter or exit as he pleases – or stay completely still, whatever suits him. This sense that anything can happen is exciting.

But of course, not everything, and not just anything, can happen. If we want the novel to read well, or our life to go well, our options start to slim. We are free in some ways, but in others we are painfully constrained. I can’t flap my arms and fly, for example. The same applies to moral and spiritual reality. There are things that thou shalt not, and things that thou shalt. The path is narrow. We are characters in the great drama written by the author of life; free to stray from the logic of the story – from what is proper given our personhood, circumstance, and so on – but when we do, this makes for something incoherent and unreadable. The great mystery of choice – which in novels is illusory, but in life I think is real – has consequences for our sense of freedom or lack thereof.

Juan Gris, The Open Book, oil on canvas, 1925.

Novels temporarily free us from decision-making, or what the philosopher Yi-Ping Ong calls “deliberative reflection.” In life, there are few, if any, thoughts that are not also tied up in choice, in our sense of identity, and in existential concerns that semiconsciously affect how we think. A human is conscious, but his consciousness is bound up in his life – in himself – and so he is not free to reflect in an objective way on consciousness itself, or at least not his own. A person thinks he observes himself, or knows himself, but often an outside observer can see things about him that are glaringly obvious, but that he remains blind to. When thinking, we are motivated by many deliberative concerns, yet this component of our thought gets largely sidelined when reading fiction. While we read, we exist in a kind of limbo; another consciousness enters into ours and temporarily replaces it.

In order to read, the reader must die. Realist novels in particular, Yi-Ping Ong writes, create “a situation in which lived experience is made known from the point of view of a participant without the … reader … thereby being burdened by the responsibility that she would normally take up by claiming this knowledge.” The reader adopts a new consciousness, one which does not involve her own self-interested will. She is born again as the fictional narrator or protagonist in front of her, a “consciousness” in a pre-plotted life – which feels alive – created by a distant author. Here, free will is an illusion. We submit ourselves to something other than ourselves, yet this submission can also be an eschewal of responsibility – responsibility to weigh options, to discern, to choose – and this can turn into compulsive escapism or worse. “Literature,” Fernando Pessoa wrote, “is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

This was, I think, partly what drew me to novels at a young age. I was attracted to books that spoke to my adolescent confusion and pain, ones I could safely identify with. The novels I loved portrayed a particular texture of consciousness that I could adopt momentarily and “try on” but that also enabled me to drift into morbid reflection, resting noncommittally in the hazy space between thought and action. Reading and thinking felt like action. I’d sit on my bed or the floor, my eyes the only part of me moving, left to right across the page. I’d skip school to read; I didn’t care about others’ interpretations of works. I acted as if I was frozen in a block of ice in a dark room, stuck with no path out; no windows above or around to look out of, just the page; no warmth to melt what froze me there, no life.

Moreover, despite literature’s unique capacity to give me insight into the other, I couldn’t actually escape myself. I projected myself onto characters, situations, dilemmas. Michael W. Clune notes that his literature students often write about things in the text that aren’t really there. They bring themselves to the text in such a way that they’re not really reading the words on the page but rather projecting meanings onto it. A single word might become a tiny reflection of oneself, a paragraph a hall of funhouse mirrors.

So my reading was some soupy mix of escape into another consciousness and projection, in which everything I read was really about me. And this mixture of escapism and self-centeredness foreshadowed what was to come shortly thereafter: my descent, which would humble me into a new kind of willingness, a new revelation, and which would lay the groundwork for another chapter of my life.

My obsession with literature coincided with another: drugs and alcohol. Novels, like drugs, produced an altered state of consciousness, one in which I felt carried by something beyond myself, toward something unknown, and one which was, to put it simply, pleasurable. In the debates about aesthetics and art, many have said that art’s primary goal is essentially the same as drugs’ effect: pleasure. But anything indulged in inordinately can trap you. The pleasure of what Kierkegaard called “reflection” – reveling in abstract thought and endless considerations – quickly becomes habitual indecision. Fantastical, aesthetical impressions can produce pleasure and a sense of possibility at first, but before long they create a state of ambient tension, a static condition composed of many little eschewals and denials. Beauty, lofty feelings, excitement – all turn into pain when used as a means to flee one’s existential reality.

Unbound, thinking scatters – unable to cohere – then sours in one’s body like curdled milk. That which oppresses us comes from within. During my fiction-and-drugs phase, everything felt undifferentiated. I had no orienting values, models, or goals that might funnel my energy toward something articulated, concrete, and specific. I wasn’t raised religious, or with any clear-cut moral framework. I was weak, prideful, resentful, and so was attracted early on to a way of looking at the world that allowed me to renounce responsibility ad infinitum, and point outward at the world and those around me as the source of my own suffering and failure. Still, I read and read. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought that literature might somehow fix me.

Juan Gris, Still Life in Front of the Window, 1922.

Literature’s inability to fix my life became apparent when I could not stop doing heroin. My ideas – about how society should be structured; about how thoughts only existed in relation to one another, and thus were all equally arbitrary and self-referential; about my professed moral relativism (but revealed ideological puritanism); about the value of literature being in its relatability, and the value of writing being in expressing oneself – had no power to effect behavioral change. I could not, by my unaided will, overcome what I only dimly sensed was something outside my control. I’d wake up in the morning, resolve to not get high, and within an hour I’d be driving to meet my dealer.

I couldn’t hold a job and was living at home. My parents had become aware of my condition, and so my mom started keeping her purse beneath her bed. I remember crawling into her bedroom one night as she slept, removing her purse from beneath the bed, and taking twenty of the sixty dollars in her purse. When I got out into the hall I started crying. I didn’t want to take the rest – I knew it’d be too obvious, and I’d get caught – but I crawled back into the room and took it anyway. I did what I did not want to do, and I did not do what I wanted to do. My habitual evasion of my responsibility to choose transformed into something that chose for me. Choices stacked up on one another until they felt like external forces – and by that point, in some sense, they were. It was as if something or someone were directing my limbs, like a puppet’s, and no matter how much I tried to think my way out of it, I simply couldn’t change.

Fleeing the conformity of what I viewed as an arbitrarily oppressive world, I’d flung myself into the service of something much more tyrannical: myself.

I overdosed, went to jail, stole from everyone I came into contact with, lied constantly, and more – all while feeling mysteriously compelled by something I couldn’t control. I was free of many things that other people felt oppressed by – jobs, relationships, the pressure to conform in various ways – but I was otherwise enslaved: I’d become a queasy remnant of myself, trapped in pale, cyclical behaviors; I was not free to become who I was.

At the time, I didn’t have a language for my problems. I didn’t have a way out, only an overwhelming, all-encompassing sense that everything was doomed. I tried to think of ways to fix my life, but my thinking was the problem. I tried to behave differently, but I couldn’t. Despite all that I had read, I had no map to chart a course out of where I’d led myself. And above all I had no power to do so.

I began to become who I was meant to be by trying to become another person. Not “another person” in the abstract, but a literal other person whose behavior I emulated, and whose advice I listened to. I met a guy who’d been friends with some of my friends, who’d briefly lived in the house where I spent much of my time writing and getting high, but who’d changed. He told me that if I wanted the kind of life he had, I had to do what he did. It wasn’t a matter of “thinking differently,” developing more self-knowledge, or having a newfound “resolve”; I simply had to do what other people had done before me, and – I had to take this part on faith – it would work for me too.

At this point, I was desperate. He told me to pray, so I prayed. I didn’t expect anything to happen – and nothing did happen. I didn’t feel any kind of white light or insight. But I knew that my new friend seemed happy and free. He told me to ask for help in the morning and say thank you at night; the worst-case scenario was that I was talking to a wall. He also told me to stop lying. I couldn’t just stop lying right away, but when I lied, I told him, and then I amended the lie. Once, in a conversation with an acquaintance, I said that I worked a certain job I didn’t work. Afterward, I called him and confessed that I actually worked construction. His voice sounded like he thought that I was joking, or like he didn’t know what to think. I made the phone call feeling terribly embarrassed; I could feel the heat behind my forehead and eyes. But I hung up feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt free.

The process was slow and arduous. It involved making many small decisions over time. My will and perspective were deformed, so it also involved doing things I did not want to do. I had walked six miles in; now I had to walk six miles out. Part of me resisted. But I had to take responsibility for myself and stop blaming others. Little by little, I stopped running from the gnawing feelings that emerged when I eschewed responsibility; instead, I limped toward them and, with effort and reluctance, addressed them, often imperfectly and fearfully. Little by little a path was cleared.

Juan Gris, Carafe and Book, oil on canvas, 1920.

By this point, literature played an ambiguous role in my life. I still read, though I didn’t know why. I barely wrote. My reasons for writing – essentially solipsistic and therapeutic ones – no longer applied. I began to focus on aesthetics, which worked for a time but eventually felt empty. I slowly chipped away at the crust of self-justification I had built up, and a new kind of possibility was revealed, a new kind of life that was not merely in word or in speech, but in deed and in truth. I found a new mode of being that was active and living.

In order to do this, I had to get comfortable with paradox: freedom in discipline; power in humility; self-esteem in repentance; expansiveness in the apparent narrowness of specific and definite choices. Moreover, I needed models I could imitate in order to develop the capacity for choice. Before, I’d imagined I was fundamentally alone. This was another aspect of reading literature that I enjoyed: just as I could inhabit another consciousness, devoid of existential risk, I could also communicate with others across time in a way that didn’t feel oppressive and didn’t immediately demand anything of me. But relationships with living people made a claim on me that words on a page did not. I had a responsibility to people in my life, and in coming up against this responsibility – most often in the form of failing to live up to a standard – I learned about myself, and grew.

In recognizing the disharmony between who I was and who I wanted to be, reflected back to me with grace by others, a way forward emerged. But I could not fix myself with myself. I had to look outside of myself, to others, for help. And not just verbal, literary, or philosophical help. I needed to participate, to emulate behaviors I wanted for myself, and then let these behaviors transform my inner life. Just as certain behaviors like getting high or stealing changed my inner life for the worse, behaviors like helping someone or telling the truth transformed my inner life for the better. I could not think my way into new action, but I could act my way into new thinking. I could not simply read or think a new life into existence. I had to act.

But in order to be able to act, mere moral injunctions and rules didn’t work. You will “meet the liberating truth in many forms, except in one form,” Paul Tillich writes; “you will never meet it in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home.” Human models weren’t totally sufficient either. The friend who had initially helped me died. Other friends moved or strayed from the path. My own progress was not straightforwardly linear either – old thinking and behaviors re-emerged in new and cunning forms, requiring more humility or willingness to course-correct – so that my progress was more like an upward spiral than a line. Things could still be unfathomably dark. The reality of sin and death permeated my life and environment in a way that was ever-present and unavoidable. In these moments, my life became small, and my God became small too. I needed a bigger God.

I was dragged toward this bigger God reluctantly and with much misgiving. My now-wife, Nicolette, became a Christian shortly before we started dating. At church with her mother, she had experienced something she found hard to articulate: the presence of Jesus. I hadn’t known many Christians growing up, and still had the typical biases: I could believe in a vague God, but anything beyond that seemed ridiculous, and the manifestations of that belief in culture that I’d been aware of had seemed, if not totally harmful, at least undeniably cringe.

Nicolette’s conversion was not, as I’d initially hoped, a phase. While we were dating long distance, in the aftermath of my friend’s death, I half-heartedly attempted to go back to my familiar ways, and after I’d gotten sober again I started taking her mom to church as a gesture of goodwill. I hated it, but I went every Sunday. Afterward, her mom would answer questions I had about the sermon, and it all remained essentially impenetrable to me. When I moved, I met some Christians I got along with, and who started a book club that met at my house. We read introductory theology and other books, and they patiently answered my questions and protestations. What does it mean to “be” a Christian? What could it possibly mean that “Jesus died for our sins”?

More than any one book or discussion, the act of eating dinner together and hanging out slowly softened me. Christians were people who you could actually hang out with. This was a total revelation for me. At one point, a brother from a nearby monastery started coming to our book club and reading the Gospels with us. We would read one Gospel out loud in one sitting, then eat dinner together. He too was someone who could hang, a real person with a sense of humor, and who’d considered many of the doubts that I had. Part of this was intellectual: things I’d been reading mapped onto my experiences and observations. I couldn’t unsee this, despite a part of me wanting to. Having friends who were Christian, as well as the woman I loved, made me able to see myself possibly becoming a Christian.

Jesus doesn’t come into a world of self-sufficient automatons, René Girard pointed out. Instead, he enters a world already rife with imitation and says imitate me. Imitation had been a crucial aspect of my life, but I had been imitating people who were imperfect, who were themselves imitating imperfect people. There was no grounding here. I needed a transcendent model.

Juan Gris, Still Life at the Open Window, 1925.

But how could Jesus actually be a model? Love could only be made manifest relationally, and I could not love an abstraction. More, an abstraction could not love me. Through reading the Gospels, long conversations with my wife and friends, praying, and going to church, I began to develop something approximating a relationship with him.

For much of my life, I had labored under the illusion that I could understand everything beforehand, that I could reflect and weigh options and have brilliant thoughts that would then lead me to a certain kind of action – or that could serve as a replacement for action – but a relationship with God, like all relationships, could not be understood beforehand. Before getting married, for example, I could understand all of the potential downsides: the restrictions, the sacrifices, the limitations on my freedom. But I couldn’t understand any of the good things beforehand, because the good things were within the experience itself. It was the same with my relationship with Jesus. And just as commitment had to precede relationships with people, my relationship with God required a leap of faith in order to participate in it more actively and fully. I decided to submit to that which had been tugging at me for years. Over and against all the fear and hesitation and things I still did not understand, I got baptized.

Even then a white light did not come over me. The skies didn’t open and certainty did not replace the doubt or self-seeking or indecision that had ruled much of my life so far. My relationship to God had to be worked out, with fear and trembling, each day – a stripping away of myself by degrees, a willingness and a hope dependent on my spiritual condition, day by day. But gradually, more grace, conviction, understanding, love, patience, willingness, and perspective entered my life and illuminated it, filling all the nooks and crannies in a way that was both painful and life-giving, making demands on me that both constrained me and set me free.

The mystery of free will – of God being the author of life and of our free participation in his story – is still a mystery. We are characters in God’s living, eternal novel – mysteriously free and predestined, alive in love and inclined toward death. Yet we are also mini-authors, made in the image of the author, who blesses our creative capacity and efforts when they are oriented toward life.

Now, literary modes of knowledge and representation continue to deepen my relationship with life and illuminate aspects of it that make my experience richer and more dynamic. I became a novelist myself, after all. But the choiceless consciousness of fiction isn’t something I frantically escape into, or merely extract nebulous pleasure from; it’s something I engage in with intention, in a way that doesn’t ignore life, but rather informs my perspective when I reemerge into a world of deliberative action, and of faith.

God, in his ultimacy, cannot simply be “interpreted” or “read” like a novel. He is not an idea, but rather he is someone who, when I am willing, frees me from the contradicted prison of my will, and points toward a reality beyond this world: one which reaches down into the present, and back into the past, and redeems it; one which – despite my obstinance and hesitation – gives me new life.