Doris Lessing – Author, Nobel Laureate and Lover of Cats

I encountered Doris Lessing through her writing, and her insight was inspiring; I was serving in the Navy at the time, stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, North Carolina. I was a Hospital Corpsman and I worked at the Naval Hospital there, on the labor and delivery ward, assisting the doctors and nurses with care.

 I went to the library on base quite often, always looking for good books to read. One day I plucked a book by Doris Lessing  off the shelf; I had no idea who she was or how significant her work had been to twentieth century literature. I was merely looking through the science-fiction section when I found her book Shikasta, from a series titled: Canopus in Argos, it was the first of five and I read it over the next few days, finishing it on the plane while I flew home to Minneapolis for a period of leave.

 My reading of Shikasta overwhelmed me with strange feelings, a kind of existential-pique that had me questioning things like the nature of personhood. I had experienced such feelings before, though rarely from reading (perhaps because of my slow pace at reading); I had experienced more often at the cinema, watching movies…but even that was rare.

 Doris Lessing’s characters were real, the questions they grappled with, questions concerning the human condition, those questions were profound, especially to me at that time in my life. And the response she gave to those questions held me and moved me. Because she addressed the philosophical questions and fundamental truths that mattered most to me:

     What is the nature of reality?

     What is the purpose of existence?

     What is the meaning of life?

 And because she did so with a profound sensitivity to the human condition, she transported me to a new place of understanding.

 Doris Lessing did not attempt to answer these questions in the way that an academic would, she was not a “professional philosopher”; she does not present a set of propositions with arguments for and against established predicates, she is not laying out a treatise or an essay, neither does she confine her hypotheses to rigid structures of logic, though the fundamental elements of logic are not absent from her writing…she puts those principles to work in the lives of her characters, puts them in conflict with each other in side their hearts and minds…she did so deftly because those principles were present to her mind.

 Doris Lessing presents her understanding of the nature of reality through narrative, through the choices her characters make and the consequences they face, she presents the essential dilemma of existence, and through the reflections her characters offer she explores its meaning and purpose.

 A couple of years after I found that first book and the others in her series: Canopus in Argos, I began my university studies. Every English major I met was familiar with Doris Lessing’ famous work, The Golden Notebook, and I quickly became aware of how influential and highly esteemed she was in literature departments all around the world.

 As I read more deeply into her body of work, moving beyond her science fiction, I found myself increasingly interested in her examination of the more subversive topics she explores in her contemporary fiction.

 Her books: Memoirs of a Survivor, Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Good Terrorist were stories that were so profound to me that I found it difficult to understand how a woman of her age and social standing could develop her characters…how she could understand them…and by extension understand me; she did it gracefully…I came to the conclusion that she was some kind of genius-empath to whom the human heart was an easy read. She understood people, that much was clear; she was radically in touch with human nature and I am grateful to have encountered her through the pages of her books.

 Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, and she was a lover of cats.