5 Chapters From My Life Story

I'm flying across the country, planning to visit one old friend in California and another in Honolulu. On assignment, I've picked out five books to revisit I first encountered in my teens and 20s that each pushed me toward who I grew up to be.

As I listen on my phone to Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet," I'm hurled back almost 60 years to my family's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's the mid-1960s and I am 14. I'm reading on my bed, but jump up, book in hand, and burst into my parents' room where my mother is applying bright red lipstick standing in front of her dresser mirror. Even now, I can smell her perfume.

"Mom," I almost shout, "listen to this. 'Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.'"

I go on: "'You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are set forth.'" And there's some solace for Mom here too: "'For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.'" She smiles. Is she stifling a laugh?

This short chapter about "Children" is among "The Prophet's" 26 prose poems about basic elements of life like "Joy and Sorrow," "Crime and Punishment" and "Eating and Drinking." This one perfectly encapsulates my developing sense of self, speaking to my growing feelings of independence.

Gibran (1883-1931) has, through time and translation, spoken these words in more than a hundred languages. Much of what he says fits our current moment: "If it is the despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected in you is destroyed." And I find his advice on marriage hits the mark: "Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone, though they quiver with the same music."

Some of it seems a little silly all these years later, or self-evident. But it's still a lovely book that, for me, replaces commandments from organized religion with imaginative guidelines for living.

"The Prophet" was a bit of a detour for me. As a young teenager, I mostly loved science fiction by authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. But it was Robert Heinlein (1907-1988), with his wicked sense of humor, his willingness to explore taboo subjects like sex and religion, and his propulsive plots that captured me most of all.

The world of "Stranger" is the not-too-distant future. Something like the United Nations has taken over the political leadership of the world — a thought less outlandish in 1961 than today. Television, in a slightly advanced 3D form, is omnipresent and driverless taxis (imagine!) are everywhere.

Valentine Michael Smith, or Mike, is a Martian-raised human. His journey on Earth is a bit like that of Frankenstein's monster, learning to be a person while made up of spare human parts. More to the point, he evokes Emma Stone in the recent film "Poor Things," who discovers her sexuality (and motor skills) in crude, amusing and astonishing ways.

Mike learns to kiss, to make love, to be a carnival barker and a charismatic religious leader, to be human without any boundaries. Heinlein makes him unimaginably wealthy, possessed of superpowers like on-demand hibernation, able to read minds and make his enemies vanish. He's also charming. Women want him, and men want to be him.

Which reminds me of another charismatic figure from the era, James Bond. And to be brutally honest, when my first girlfriend accused me of kissing like 007, it wasn't meant as a compliment. Mike's gentle and tender behavior with women was a much better model.

And if you "grok" something, understanding it deeply, that's a word Heinlein invented to illustrate the power of Mike's empathy.

There are some problems with this book in today's world. The risk is that all the talk of breasts and group sex will be taken literally and risk "canceling" the whole enterprise. But Mike's discoveries about intimacy, his brave leadership and final sacrifice, all hit home for me as an adolescent, and helped flesh out my developing id.

And speaking of id, Roth's treatise on sex, guilt, religion, neurosis and psychoanalysis found me a few years after "Stranger." Rereading this novel about young Portnoy's sexual awakening, and the strangled cry for help from his older self, I feel its power, cloaked in both humor and self-loathing.

Growing up in the Bronx, our Jewish family was less observant than Roth's fictional New Jersey Portnoys. But the book showcases certain immovable truths about our tribe, from the over-involved mothers to our young men lusting after women with blonde hair and button noses. My father's nickname (Hymie!) was literally the slur that non-Jews called our people, and which Roth (1933-2018) appropriated for a fictional uncle in this novel.

Had I survived a priapic adolescence like Alex Portnoy's? Not exactly, although his struggles struck a nerve. Did I have my own troubles discovering a path to intimacy that honored the young women with whom I had relationships? Sadly, yes.

It's funny what you remember about a book after 50 years. The purposely shocking stuff, of course, but also what Roth literally labels "The Punchline" — which dares you to call the preceding pages a joke. It's this coda — "So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" — that gives the book hope, and which challenges you not to write off poor Portnoy (or yourself), if the cultural challenges of being Jewish and male in America have sometimes been a lot to bear.

I graduated from the University of Chicago in 1973 and headed to California. For me, it was a promised land much like Israel was for Portnoy. After a year in graduate school, I flunked out, but stayed in Berkeley, looking for my next chapter. And I found it in "Zen and the Art." My memory of the book before I revisited it this fall was that it was about a property called "Quality" — and how it could be leveraged to approach the inner workings of something complex but inanimate, like a motorcycle.

To a kid from New York City who had never worked with his hands, this was compelling. I was a piano player, regularly encountering instruments that were broken or out of tune. Perhaps I could learn the lessons that Pirsig (1928-2017) taught in his book and apply them to pianos, to coax "quality" out of each one so that it worked perfectly and vibrated to the frequencies of the planets and stars.

With this in mind, I apprenticed myself to a family friend who was a piano technician. On day one, he sat me down with a pile of piano parts called flanges, and instructed me to replace the felt where they pivoted on a brass pin. He said to test each one so that it swung back and forth at least four times and no more than six. If I hadn't read "Zen and the Art," I wouldn't have lasted the day.

I tuned pianos for years after that, but imagine my surprise when, on revisiting "Zen and the Art" this fall, I found I'd remembered only a fraction of its life-altering lessons. In fact, it's not primarily about fixing motorcycles; it's about fatherhood, philosophy and, this knocked me out, it's a portrait of  overcoming mental illness.

Like me, Pirsig had a breakdown during his time at the University of Chicago, where he went to study philosophy. Journeying west with his son on a motorcycle trip with friends, grappling with difficult philosophical arguments, Pirsig describes his path back to sanity by first portraying himself as two different people. Reliving the earthquakes of electroshock therapy, he somehow unifies his soul and shows us how he reclaimed his mental health.

I'll leave for you to discover the devastating reveal from Pirsig's introduction to the 10th anniversary edition. I'll just say it made me want to hug my daughter tight.

Of the books I reread, this is the only one universally considered a masterpiece, although "Portnoy" has its adherents and "Zen and the Art" had a bigger direct effect on my life. When I read "Invisible Man" in my early 20s, I was naïve about race, even after growing up in New York City and going to school with an integrated cohort of lively and creative friends.

Ellison's (1914-1994) "bildungsroman" takes its unnamed protagonist from a Black college in the South to a series of encounters with a world that devalues and, yes, erases him. The journey is moving, entertaining and horrifying.

In one vivid scene, the narrator works in a secret factory that creates paint so white it can transform coal; in another section, he is put in charge of the Harlem branch of a secret organization that exists only to perpetuate racism.

Along the way, he picks up talismans: a link of metal from a chain gang that echoes the chains of slavery; a Sambo doll that recalls the sordid history of American racism. There's nothing subtle about any of this: it's funny, savage and true.

"Invisible Man" vividly instructed my younger self how much I didn't know about others' lived experiences and spurred me to be more understanding, accepting, loving. Revisiting it allowed me to measure my progress, and see how far I, and the rest of society, still have to go.

Steve Mencher Steve Mencher lives with his wife in a 15-minute community in Baltimore. He is a writer and multimedia producer who has developed stories, films, podcasts and websites for the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Defense Department and AARP. He’s the founding producer of "Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast." Early in his career, he worked for NPR and Carnegie Hall. Read More