'Entering a Zone of Timelessness'

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.”