'Wide and Casual Rather Than Scholarly'

Wednesday morning I spent almost two hours in a clean, well-lighted MRI tube. The radiologist had a sense of humor and wasn’t offended when, after about ninety minutes, I said that I felt trapped in an oversized, costive colon (not my precise wording). His reply: “No laxatives here, man.” The CT scan that followed was brief and uneventful. That morning I had brought with me a Montale collection to read in the waiting room but wasn’t permitted to bring it with me into the imaging contraption, so I emptied my head and almost fell asleep. Then I wished I had something to read and dealt with that irritation by “reading” the buff-colored lining of the tube. Tiny marks in or on the paint – chips or stains – suddenly demanded decrypting. Had they been left by the desperate clawing of a previous patient? My print-deprived brain devised a cheesy horror-movie plot. Then it was over.

Back home, I wanted to write something about W.H. Auden on this, his 112^th birthday, and pulled The Prolific and the Devourer off the shelf. Auden wrote it in 1939, soon after arriving in the U.S. He abandoned the book after the Nazi invasion of Poland and it was first published posthumously, in 1981. Between its pages I was surprised to find a clipping of a newspaper column I had written, dated January 17, 1989. It was about books. What a surprise. After my urge for something to read in the MRI tube, this paragraph seemed pertinent:

“I often wonder what people do who don’t know how to read. I don’t necessarily mean illiterates. I mean people who, technically, can make sense of the lexical array that surrounds us, but choose, instead, to watch television or God knows what else.”

I can still sign my name to that after thirty years. I browsed Auden’s aphorisms and reflections and was gratified to find this:

 “My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”