'The Strange Swoon of Reading'

“In the house where I grew up, I used to wake before anyone else so that I’d have the early morning hours to read books before going to school.”

That time of day has always been jealously protected. Sleep was bracketed by books. I fell asleep reading and woke to reading. I’m not the sort of dreamer whose conscious life seeps much into his dreams, the way it happens in movies. Reading is too private and autonomous to enter the subconscious. I’ve never dreamed about the contents of books, but the bookstore in Cleveland where I worked almost half a century ago periodically makes an appearance.

 

When I was a high-school junior, a young English teacher loaned me a textbook of short stories, most of which I hadn't yet read. A few years earlier she had used it in a class at Kent State University. One morning I woke and read, for the first time, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I had never before read a story that hit me with the vivid violence of a movie. It shook me and I carried the small trauma of it through the school day.

 

Around the same time I was reading for the first time The Adventures of Augie March. For a budding writer already given to overwriting, Bellow’s prose was a liberating rush. And then one morning I encountered a description of Augie riding the rails, trying to get back to Chicago, in Chap. 9:

 

“So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face.”

 

This was like spying a picture of my face in an old book. Augie – that is, Bellow -- saw my hometown and described it briefly and accurately (“great yards and overbuilt hills”: The Flats). I felt some inarticulate insight into the linkage between the real and the fictional. That energized me for the balance of the school day.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, W.S. Di Piero recounts his boyhood reading in “Out of Notebooks,” collected in Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures (1996). He continues: “Reading was a blissful, auroral time; school was dutiful and hollow,” and  he refers to “the strange swoon of reading.” That sensation has never gone away.