'In My Hands the Morning They Find Me'

Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude. 

I know I favored singable poems (Stevenson), field guides to butterflies and wildflowers, and collections of brief biographies of the famous and heroic. I remember juvenile monographs devoted to Marie Curie and Davy Crockett. On the cover of the latter, Crockett is on the wall of the Alamo, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat at the Mexican army.  The first “grown-up” book I remember reading was The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber, a fellow Ohioan. If those are the first, what about the last? Robert Richman (1957-2021), former poetry editor of The New Criterion, poses that question in “The Last Book,” published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Paris Review:

 

“What will be the last book

I read? Woolf’s finest work,

the only one I shunned?

The Turgenev novel

everyone disdains?

End Game in Poetry,

a just-uncovered work

by Grandmaster Borges,

or Dinesen’s stories,

seeking for a fourth time

the mercy of my eyes?

What will be in my hands

the morning they find me?

A dog-eared Borzoi,

or sassy new Penguin?

A pockmarked Pantheon,

or pristine Random House?

And will the failed-poet

coroner claim foul play

and confiscate the thing?

Will the book then appear

in a dealer’s locked case,

scarred by marginalia

claimed to be authentic,

where I propose a brief

tying-up-of-ends-type

poem? Or will the last book

be the one that I wrote

and never could abide,

but could read that night

with kinder eyes, and whom

I turned slowly to greet

like a long-lost daughter?”

 

Richman died at age sixty-three – too young but old enough to begin thinking of last things – the last kiss, the last laugh, the last book read.