In Folly, protagonist Rae Newborn works her way out of debilitating depression by building a house. Artisan of wood in her former life, she pieces together her redemption on a solitary island in the Pacific northwest.

Rae is not only the scarred creation of her writer. She is the writer’s scars, revealed as socially useful things.

Another contemporary novelist, Jonathan Franzen, sees reading as antidote to our myriad techno distractions.

‘Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. “We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,” Franzen says. “The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”’
Lev Grossman, Jonathan Franzen, Time Magazine August 23, 2010

Folly’s creator, Laurie R. King, draws us safely into insanity and grief. She gives us permission to explore the imperfections that tell our past and shape the rest of our lives.

Shapes and textures of physical scars break the skin like the surprising eruption of mushrooms that populate the forest floor in mid August. If you’re like me, your scars tend to linger in bold relief, so it’s easy to remember the little girl who jumped on the bed and gashed her lip, the young woman who collapsed her lung in a bike accident, ending up with a chest tube, the grown daughter burning her leg on a bare bulb while painting woodwork in her fathers’ empty condo with one low set lamp to see by. I’m growing a new one now on the hand too hastily thrust into a glass made to drink from but quite capable of slicing into the organ we call skin.

Mushrooms and scars might seem ugly. Neither elicits immediate awe the way flowers do, or newborn babes. Maybe we respect the mushroom’s unapologetic overnight bloom, the scarred skin’s unique approach to healing, but is either thing beautiful?

It all depends, I think, on engaging with reality with sustained attention. Sustainable thought? Imagine that, reading, the oldest of green technologies.

Photo Susan Weber, from Flickr set