Having long passed the Biblical span of three score years and ten, I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be very carefully husbanded.
One thing this means is that I simply cannot read as indiscriminately as I did when I was younger. Long gone are those days which seemed without an end when I read all those Charles Dickens 900 page blockbusters like The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick
Club and Nicholas Nickleby. Long gone those days when I happily found the life-space to read Edward Gibbon’s immense and magnificent Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Marcel Proust’s multi-volumed Remembrance of Things Past and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and James Joyce’s marvellously mind-opening Ulysses.
Never again will I read a book as long as Edgar Mittelholzer’s vast and fascinating Kaywana trilogy as I did when life went on forever. And, by the way, what a sadness for young Guyanese that sprawling masterpiece is no longer easily available. In a well-ordered Guyanese universe Mittelholzer’s novels would never be out of print. (But, I am glad to report, some of them are due to be published by Peepal Tree Press in the Guyana Classics series).
Such blockbuster reading now would consume too much of life that is left. I read shorter books. I read magazines. I read poetry. This way my love of reading is satisfied, and my fear of time wasted eased a little. Basically I have decided the time has come when it is better to read good reviews of, say, 100 books rather than read one massive book, however magnificent. I know that this means that my knowledge of the books I read about but do not actually read will be essentially superficial. What can I say about this slightly ignominious choice except that it seems the right one for me now and that there still is the occasional book, however long, which I find irresistible.
An example was Edmund Morris’s extraordinary biography of Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, in two volumes (there was to be a third volume but I have not yet seen it). Not one page of the 1,627 pages in the first two volumes was anything less than enthralling in telling the story of this much-larger-than-life man. Ironically, he was a man who would have scorned any weary decision not to read long books any more. Here is his biographer on President Roosevelt’s reading habits:
“‘Reading with me is a disease.’ He succumbs to it so totally – on the heaving deck of the Presidential yacht, in the middle of a cyclone, between whistle-steps on a campaign trip, even while waiting for his carriage at the front door – that he cannot hear his own name being spoken. Nothing short of a thump on the back will regain his attention. Asked to summarize the book he has been leafing through with such apparent haste, he will do so in minute detail, often quoting the actual text.”
The President manages to get through at least one book a day even when he is busy. Owen Wister lent him a book shortly before a full evening’s entertainment at the White House, and was astonished to hear a complete review of it over breakfast. “Somewhere between six one evening and eight-thirty next morning, beside his dressing and his dinner and his guests and his sleep, he had read a volume of three-hundred-and-odd pages, and missed nothing of significance that it contained.
“On evenings when he has no official entertaining to do, Roosevelt will read two or three books entire. His appetite for titles is omnivorous and insatiable, ranging from the Histories of Thucydides to the Tales of Uncle Remus. Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy. In the past year alone, Roosevelt has devoured all the novels of Trollope, the complete works of De Quincey, a Life of Saint Patrick, the prose works of Milton and Tacitus (“until I could stand them no longer”). Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, the seafaring yarns of Jacobs, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, a German novel call Jorn Uhl, “a most satisfactorily lurid Man-eating Lion story.” And Foulke’s Life of Oliver P. Morton, not to mention at least five hundred other volumes, on subjects ranging from tropical flora to Italian naval history.”
The richness of Roosevelt’s knowledge causes a continuous process of cross-fertilization to go in his mind. Standing with candle in hand at a baptismal service in Santa Fe, he reflects that his ancestors, and those of the child’s Mexican father, “doubtless fought in the Netherlands in the days of Alva and Parma.” Watching a group of American sailors joke about bedbugs in the navy, he is reminded of the freedom of comment traditionally allowed to Roman legionnaires after battle. Trying to persuade Congress to adopt a system of simplified spelling in government documents, he unself-consciously cites a treatise on the subject published in the time of Cromwell.
“Tonight the President will bury himself, perhaps, in two volumes Mrs. Lodge has just sent him for review: Gissing’s Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, and The Greek View of Life, by Lowes Dickinson. He will be struck, as he peruses the latter, by interesting parallels between the Periclean attitude toward women and that of present-day Japan, and will make a mental note to write to Mrs. Lodge about it. He may also read, with alternate approval and disapproval, two articles on Mormonism in the latest issue of Outlook. A five-thousand-word essay on ‘The Ancient Irish Sagas’ in this month’s Century magazine will not detain him long, since he is himself the author.”
What an extraordinary catalogue! What a marvel of a mind to have that capacity to absorb so much, so quickly, so completely!
Let me now give an example of a marvellous book which I saw reviewed but decided I would not get to read. It is Remarkable Trees of the World written by Thomas Pakenham and illustrated with photographs of sixty extraordinary trees taken by himself.
The book was temptingly described in the review. Here, for instance, is the world’s tallest tree, a 368 foot high California coast redwood known as the Stratospheric Giant. Regarding the largest tree in the world, there is some argument. The giant sequoia known as General Sherman, growing in California’s Sequoia National Park, weighs 1,500 tons and is usually said to be the largest living thing on earth. But Thomas Pakenham argues that its rival, the giant General Grant of King’s Canyon National Park, exceeds Sherman in height and girth if not in volume. As for the oldest living thing on earth, this is a bristlecone pine, over 4,600 years old, growing at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the White Mountains of California. The identity of this tree, which grows in Methuselah Grove alongside many other ancient specimens, is a closely guarded secret: it has been slowly dying for the past two thousand years and is very fragile.
It would be deeply satisfying to read this whole book about remarkable trees. And the same comment applies to hundreds of other books I read about. But there is no longer the time to spare. I must reconcile myself to taking very tiny sips from the eternal spring of knowledge and of beauty.
