A History of Books Read Free Page B

among these people was a man who was taller and more enterprising than his fellows and who helped to launch several lifeboats and to guide people into the boats.
    The man standing on the cliff took an interest in the few details that he seemed to remember from books that he had read. He had been trying for some years to complete the final draft of a long work of fiction, although he had excused himself from writing during the previous year on account of his wife’s illness. While he stood on the cliff, he seemed about to learn something that would be of much use to him as a writer of fiction but he was not observant enough to notice such a detail in his mind as that the image of the wrecked sailing ship in his mind was not an image of any sort of nineteenth-century vessel. Not until twenty years later would the man notice that the details of the imageship were those of a line drawing of a Portuguese caravel from the fifteenth century. The man knew hardly anything about any sort of ocean-going vessel, but in his twelfth year he had copied into a school exercise book as part of a so-called project a line drawing of a caravel. As part of the same so-called project, he had searched several pages in his atlas for places bearing namesthat seemed to be Portuguese. One such place that he found was the island named Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, which island his teacher had not previously known about and which she supposed at first to be a fictional island in some or another book of fiction that the boy had read.
    Sometimes while the man saw in his mind the image of the foundered ship, he saw also indistinct images of persons struggling in the ocean or being swept onto the shore. Some of these images may have first appeared to the man while he had read, more than thirty years before, some or another book by the famous author; others of the images may have first appeared while he had been reading a certain book about shipwrecks on the south-west coast of Victoria. This book had been recommended to him by one of the sisters of the woman who had recommended the works of fiction by the famous author. The sister, who was, of course, another of the boy’s aunts, had recommended especially the chapter in the book reporting the wreck of a certain vessel, sixty years before the boy’s birth, in a small bay beneath tall cliffs about thirty miles from the farmhouse where the four unmarried siblings lived. The wreck of this vessel was famous, so the aunt told the boy, because only two persons had survived it: a young apprentice seaman and a young female passenger. The young seaman had saved the young woman from drowning, and their story was later reported in newspapers in Australia and England. According to the aunt, many people expected that the two young persons would later marry, but they went their separate ways.
    On every night that he spent at the farmhouse, the boy heard before he fell asleep the sounds of the ocean in the bay or cove beneath the nearby cliffs. After he had read the chapter about the famous wreck, he saw often before he fell asleep images of a young man and a young woman whom he had dragged to shore and whom he had carried from the beach to a cave under a tall cliff where he had laid her down before going in search of grass and bunches of foliage to cover her and to keep her warm, all the while averting his eyes so that she might later fall in love with him because he had behaved differently from many another young man who would have stared at her nakedness.
    While the man mentioned earlier was going down from the cliffs to join his wife and their children in the bay or cove, an image occurred to him of the corpse of a tall young man lying on a beach with a wrecked vessel in the background. The head of the image-corpse rested on a folded arm in the same way that the head of the young man, during his life, had rested often before sleep. When the man had first read, as a boy, the passage that had