How It All Began

by Penelope Lively

So there it was, there it had been, a teaching life, a career if you must call it that, and Charlotte now looks back on it with a certain satisfaction, and then scolds herself for being smug. I was a conduit, she thinks, that’s all. I was lucky enough to have the knack of transmission—I could get them to see and hear a poem, to absorb a novel. The power is in the stuff itself—language; all you have to do is show the way.

She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience. Thus has reading wound in with living, each a complement to the other. Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks. She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.

He rattled through the darkness, reading.