I Hope You Have 1,000 Broken Hearts

Dear Eleanor and Wesley,

I hope that you have 1,000 broken hearts, that you would know love for it’s depth of beauty and pain. My wish is for you to suffer insult and survive betrayal. I would that your best laid plans might crumble at the crucial moment. Perhaps you’ll travel the road long enough to see friends become enemies or your family grow unrecognizable.  I hope you reckon with the long and lonely darkness of night when hope is all but extinguished. I dream that suspense and terror might become you. What I mean to say is that I hope you love books as much as I do. 

This process is a transformative experience. Reading is a joy that is becoming increasingly rare in society at large. I can’t imagine how your crew will look on it. What I can say is that one can live a thousand lifetimes through the written word. They are tiny windows into existences, real or imagined, that you can climb inside of and live out your loftiest dreams and deepest fears. You can be whisked off to places you never could have imagined. In some of the best, you can conjure a brief, tangible sense of home. Reading is harder than a movie and less in your face than a video game. Though, once your literacy is honed to the pure pleasure of it, there is nothing else like a good book. 

Now for all of the spoilers that would have ruined the punchline. I hope you are encahnted by the simple magic of life in the forest inside a boxcar. I want you to squirm with the anticipation and satisfaction of being sorted into the perfect house and embrace the way that conquering a troll can create inseparable bonds.  You should wonder at traveling through a wardrobe or inside a great glass elevator. I hope you dream of the precise way in which you might arrange your hobbit hole. Triumph over the striped power of your shipwrecked tiger companion. Experience the trembling awe of a conquering lion. Listen to the still soft voice of a Word that lives, breathes, and speaks the last thing you’d expect and the exact assurance your heart needs to hear. 

Go read a book.

Sincerely,
Dad