If one had the power to give a child a single gift but no other, the gift to choose would be a love of reading. That is a gift which incomparably combines immense usefulness with life-long access to intellectual stimulation, emotional delights, spiritual inspiration and unceasing entertainment. The usefulness comes in the huge head-start a love of reading gives a child in his or her education. A child who loves reading is going to learn faster and better than his or her peers who do not and is going to be able to retain and organize and express what is learnt much more usefully and with infinitely more effect than those whose minds are closed to books. I guarantee – all the top students in school and universities are good readers and love books.
But as one gets older it is the intellectual delight and pure pleasure in reading that count more and more. How can one ever be bored if one loves reading? It is impossible. The imagination fills with a whole series of lives and ideas, old delights, new departures, fresh challenges, eternal truths. The joy is unending. Old as I am, every day is made marvellous by reading. Take a selection from my own recent reading:
- Browsing in a new book on W H Auden: he writes in his journal: “No woman ever wrote nonsense verse. Women are realists. I think if men knew what women said to each other about them, the human race would die out.” And again: “The poet’s one political duty is to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue – because when language deteriorates, force takes over.”
- People who love reading also write and receive letters – now emails. An old friend writes from New Orleans and copies from a card in his hotel room: “We are all travellers. From birth to death we travel between eternities. May these days be pleasant for you, profitable for society, helpful for those you meet, and a joy to those who know and love you best.” Even in soulless hotel rooms you can find truth.
- In an essay in the New York Review of Books I find a verse by Lewis Carrol that goes to the heart of moral cowardice:
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark.
But, when the tide’s high and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.
I read an article about “miracles” and that shrewd old doctor of the ancient Church, St Augustine, suddenly pulls me up with a sentence: “A miracle occurs not in contradiction of nature but in contradiction of what we know about nature.” Perhaps I should think about it a little more deeply? And I think of Einstein, the greatest scientist and mathematician of this or perhaps any age: “What we know about nature so far is still just a touch of water on the finger of a man kneeling and dipping his hand in a vast and unknown sea.”
- Here is a beautiful poem by Wislawa Szymborska whose work increasingly moves me to love and admiration.
I Am Too Close For Him To Dream About Me
I am too close for him to dream about me
I’m not flying over him, not fleeing him
under the roots of a tree. I am too close.
Not with my voice sings the fish in the net.
Not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too close. A large house is on fire
without my calling for help. Too close
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too close for me to enter as a guest
before whom the walls part.
Never again will I die so readily,
so far beyond the flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. I am too close,
too close – I hear the hiss
and see the glittering husk of that word
as I lie immobilized in his embrace. He sleeps,
more available at this moment
to the ticket lady of a wandering circus with one lion
seen but once in his life
than to me lying beside him.
Now for her in him grows a valley, ochre-leaved,
closed off by a snowy mountain
in the azure air. I am too close
to fall out of the sky for him. My scream
might only awaken him. Poor me,
limited to my own form,
but I was a birch tree, I was a lizard,
I emerged from satins and sundials,
my skins shimmering in different colours, But I possessed
the grace to disappear from astonished eyes,
and this is the rich man’s riches. I am too close,
too close for him to dream about me.
I pull my arm out from under his sleeping head.
It’s numb, full of imaginary pins and needles,
And on the head of each, ready to be counted,
dance the fallen angels.
I will not interpret the poem if only because each person interprets a good poem differently. But does it not make you think a little more clearly, feel a little more intensely, about something we all think and feel now and then but not often enough – how what is good in our lives we too easily become accustomed to, how those we love deeply we too often take for granted, and how these all too human tendencies can be the source of intolerable loss?
Ah, this good Kingdom of Books: May all our children have the good fortune to inherit such a Kingdom.
