For Kellie: One Reason that I Love A Room with a View

A Room with a View is my favorite and is my best. I have read that book so many times, I have some parts memorized. Knowing that I love it, Kellie texted me the other day to say that her book club was going to be reading it. I texted back, "I don't know anyone besides me that likes it." I even have a couple of friends who tried to read it but gave up. Crazy people! A Room with a View is such a perfect book.

The other day I was listening to President Uchtdorf's talk from the last General Conference, and he told a story of a woman who'd had a terrible childhood but had grown up and overcome it. Then later as an adult, she again began to be weighed down by her past. He said that eventually she realized that for her "the best path for healing was to understand and accept that darkness exists - but not to dwell there. For, as she now knew, light also exists - and that is where she chose to dwell."

That quote reminded me of one of the themes of A Room with a View. The character George has trouble with depression because he's weighed down by "the everlasting Why," as Forster puts it. In other words, why are we here? Why do people we love die? Why is there so much suffering in the world? What is the point of all of this?

George's dad says to Lucy (the main character), "All life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice...Make [George] realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes - a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes."

I have a tendency at times to feel overwhelmed by the everlasting Why. There are tornadoes and marathon bombings and school shootings and my boots are so heavy (as another favorite literary character would say) that I struggle to get myself out of bed in the morning. That's when this quote from A Room with a View runs through my head. I don't fully understand the Why, but I can rejoice in the Yes. Darkness may exist, but I can choose where I dwell.