Each of us carries around little pockets of guilt, misdemeanors camouflaged and unsuspected even by our dearest. They remain dormant until roused, jab our conscience and are forgotten until stirred again. I found my first-grade report card from Pearl Road Elementary School. The grades and comments were handwritten by the teacher, Miss McClain. In June 1959, at the end of the school year, she wrote: “Pat is reading beyond his years. If he continues this way there will be no stopping him.”
That’s not what makes me feel guilty. Rather, it’s the way I read, now gone – quickly, at an
industrial clip. I would borrow a stack of books from the library and read half
of them or more by bedtime. I consumed books hungrily. Later, I would read one
of the Tarzan, Barsoom or Pellucidar novels in an evening, start the next
volume in the series, and resent the arrival of sleep. What do I retain from
all that manic consumption? Almost nothing, a bittersweet memory of satisfaction
and the consolation that I still love to read. This accelerated pace of reading continued
for years, into my teens. Then it was gone. I have become a very slow reader –
increasingly slow. There’s no loss of comprehension, and reading slowly has its
advantages. Books now take more time, though the hunger has never waned – a realization compounded by reading a number of books simultaneously. It’s good to know I’m not alone:
“I am a fast
reader who became a slow reader. I started in the fast-reading lane in the
sense that I learned to read unusually young and was treated as a freak show .
. .”
That’s the
late Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll in a 2005 essay, “The Library of Adventure,”
later collected in The Outnumbered Poet
(Gallery Books, 2013). He died in 2012 at age fifty-eight. He spanned
disciplines and “lifestyles,” and defied most of our stereotypes about poets
and how they behave and earn a living. O’Driscoll joined the Office of the
Revenue Commissioners in Dublin at age sixteen, specializing in “death duties,
stamp duties, and customs,” and remained there for almost forty years. O’Driscoll
is not bragging, though I suspect he was quietly proud of being a sort of savant:
“My greed
for words gathered momentum in secondary school with essay competitions, radio
scripts, a verse-speaking medal, slogan and caption entries. I read with the
obsession of an addict in the grip of an uncontrollable urge. Whatever had been
written, I wanted to read. Whatever there was to read, I wanted to have read.
Eventually, what there wasn’t to read, I wanted to write.”
You’ll note the
qualifying phrase: “My greed for words” – not for stories or even knowledge.
Some of us are parched for language and remember this exchange:
Polonius: “What
do you read, my lord?”
Hamlet: “Words,
words, words.”
That’s not
to deny the importance of sense or information. It’s the taste of words themselves that makes us
hungry for more, and the reason indifferent poetry and mediocre prose are so
insultingly unreadable. O’Driscoll’s essay is autobiography and
poetic apologia masking as a reading reminiscence, a traditional essayistic form
(see Hazlitt, Lamb, Davenport, et al.).
Near the conclusion he writes:
“It is
difficult to state precisely why reading is so essential. It is impossible to
disentangle the linguistic pleasures from the moral insights, the wisdom from
the knowledge, the cadence from the characterization. . . . One may quickly
forget the details of a plot or the premises of a philosophy and yet feel
changed forever by having read the book. ‘Education is what remains after one
has forgotten what one has learned in school,’ is Albert Einstein’s
formulation. The nearest adult experience I know to being a child, eagerly
turning pages in the kitchen while my mother—hands gloved in a dishcloth—takes
from the oven a sugar-dusted apple pie that is sweating cinnamon through its
pores, is being a slow reader of a great book, entering a zone of timelessness.
I suspect that it is only in such a state that we are detached enough from the
attachments of the everyday to gain access to those profound truths and
poignant yearnings that are the ultimate goal of serious readers and the
richest reward a writer can bestow.”
1 comment:
I'm in exactly the same boat. Once during my middle school years I read The Chessmen of Mars in one sitting - 300+ pages of Burroughs at his most baroque. (For the record, when it comes to Burroughs, I'd still rather read Edgar Rice than William.) The days when I could do such a thing are long gone. Now I too read slowly, but I get the benefit of both worlds - I often feel that I'm still reading too quickly to give serious books the deep reading they deserve. I think most books have an ideal pace, and it's getting harder and harder for me to find just what it is.
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