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Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional objects. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does. I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. My books, therefore, have always been rigidly regimented.
My father, of course—the champion to date—is Wally, and therefore occupies a class by himself, though I would also venture that he was aided by being ninety years old, and thus an intellectual product of the same era that shaped Carl Van Vechten. My lawyer friend, who knew seven words, restricts his reading almost entirely to works published before World War I. He is forty-one, but he might as well be ninety.
“We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. Just listen to the words on your list! The words we’ve lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we’ve gained tend to be denotative. I’ve never seen modem used in a poem.”
When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
On March 17, Oates, realizing that his frostbitten and gangrenous feet were handicapping the rest of the party, uttered the most famous and gallant words in the history of polar exploration: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Then he stumbled out of the tent into a blizzard, never to be seen again. It was his thirty-second birthday. Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead
I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble.
Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed To———with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line, With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
While sailing to India he read Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Bacon, Cervantes, and all seventy volumes of Voltaire. That’s a partial list. “What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.
My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parents’ rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood.
Doing is the best teaching.
When the leadership of Great Britain pressed too heavily on him, Gladstone did one of three things: felled large trees with an ax; walked around London talking to prostitutes; or arranged books. It was an odd trio of diversions,
Stress management for the 19th century Briton. Today it would be cold plunges, journalling, and staring into the sun. Which will certainly seem equally silly in the 2200s.
