A History of Books Read Free

that extended a little way in among the image-hills. The image-boy-man admired the image-trees but had never wished to go alone into the image-woodland.
    The surname of the image-boy-man was part of the title of the book mentioned earlier, and the boy who had read the book several times always considered the image-boy-man the chief character of the book. Sixty and more years after he had last read the book, and when he better understood the workings of books of fiction, the man who had been the boy-reader understood that the chief character of the book was he who was denoted by the second word of the title. This character was an image-boy no older than the boy-reader himself had been while he was reading. The narrator of the book reported many of the images that appeared in the mind of this image-boy and many of his image-feelings but nothing of what took place in the mind of the image-boy-man who employed the chief character as his fag.
    The chief character was reported as first disliking and fearing his employer but later admiring him – disliking him because the boy-men, his employer’s classmates, all disliked him and shunned him; fearing him because he spoke alwayssternly to the chief character; admiring him because he seemed not to care that his classmates disliked him and shunned him and because he went on reading or writing in his study every evening in such a way that he, the chief character, could never suppose what his employer might have seen in his mind, much less what he might have felt; admiring him also because he trained during many an afternoon for a certain long-distance race conducted by the school and later came from far back in the field and won the race.
    The boy in the classroom mentioned earlier seldom recalled any character from any book. In the books that he read were too many so-called adventures. The characters in those books took part in one after another so-called adventure whereas the boy wanted to read about male and female characters falling in love with one another. The boy himself often fell in love – mostly with girls of his own age but often with young women and sometimes with young men. A few months before he had begun to read for the third or the fourth time about the image-boy-man whose surname was part of the title of a book of fiction, the boy had fallen in love with the girl in whose mind, so he supposed a few months later, was an image of a marble statue. Sometimes the boy wished that he could write books instead of merely reading them. The girl-characters or the young-women-characters in his books would understand why the boy-characters had fallen in love with them, but the boy could never have found the words for writing about such a matter. Nor could he have found the words for writing about boy-characters or young-men-characters who wereable to prevent other persons from knowing what images they, the characters, saw in their minds or what feelings those images gave rise to, although he sometimes wished to write about those matters also.
    The boy reading in the classroom wanted to conceal his thoughts and feelings from the girl who was looking into the volume mentioned earlier. A few days before, the boy had given the girl to understand that he had fallen in love with her, but he was still waiting to learn what this had caused the girl to think or to feel.
    When the boy had taken from one of the shelves in the classroom the book about the fictional character whose fictional feelings remained unknown, the girl had taken from another shelf a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The older children knew that the volume contained illustrations of statues of naked men and women. The boy himself sometimes looked at the image-breasts of the image-women and at the smooth image-places between their image-thighs. The boy could not recall the girl’s having previously looked into the volume, but while he was reading that a fictional boy-man sat reading or writing in his