Illusions by Richard Bach

Today, I am so excited that I’m popping out of my skin (no more coffee for me, thanks). After work today, I am going to the airport to pick up my two best friends from grade school, L and S, who are coming to spend the weekend with me. We have known each other since we were six years old, and we live in three different parts of the country now. Our hope is to have a reunion every year.

In preparation for their arrival, I have gone through some old shoeboxes of mementos I’ve kept from high school. We were crazy, happy, sentimental teenagers back then, and had made a rule for each other: if one of us wrote the date on a piece of paper (a letter, a passed note, a napkin with doodles on it), you had to keep it forever. So I have a bunch of shoeboxes.

I also noticed that I still own a few books from those days. One of our favorite authors in high school was Richard Bach, and Illusions was my favorite of his. I was particularly fond of Illusions because of the idea of the Messiah’s Handbook.

In the story, the “Messiah” character has a book full of maxims and short paragraphs designed to impart some wisdom or make you think about your problems differently, such as, “You teach best what you most need to learn,” or one we particularly liked, “Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet them than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.” It was like crack for nerds.

The important point, however, was not the Handbook itself, or even the actual aphorisms found in the fictional book (sadly, the book is no longer fictional-- some marketing brainchild produced this in 2004). The point was, according to this character, “you can do it with any book. You can do it with an old newspaper, if you read it carefully enough. Haven’t you done that, hold some problem in your mind, then open any book handy and see what it tells you?” I'm sure I tried it in high school, but I can't remember the last time I turned to books for answers. How could I have forgotten about this?

I found a scrap of paper stuck in the yellowing pages of my copy of Illusions at my favorite of all the quotes. This is what the marked page says:

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

I’ve done it. It’s true.

Illusions by Richard Bach

tags: books book reviews Messiah Handbook best friends Richard Bach