How Reading Changed My Life Read Free Page B

wrong: a reader learns what he or she does not know from books, what has passed and yet is forever present through print. The mating rituals of the Trobriand Islanders. The travails of the Donner Party. The beaches at Normandy. The smoke from the stacks at Auschwitz. Experience, emotion, landscape: the world is as layered as the earth, life cumulative with books. The eyewitnesses die; the written word lives forever. So does the antipathy that ties twobrothers together in
East of Eden
, and the female search for independent identity in
The Golden Notebook
. How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of
Pride and Prejudice
and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind. “To completely analyse what we do when we read,” wrote E. B. Huey, “would almost be the acme of the psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind.” Yet we take it so for granted, the ability to simply flip the pages and to know what the daughter of a parson, now long dead, once thought of the conventions of matrimony in Regency England, and, certainly, of the relations between men and women into perpetuity.
    It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light. Perhaps this only becomes clear when one watches a child do it. Dulled to the mystery by years of STOP signs, recipes, form letters, package instructions, suddenly it is self-evident that this is a strange and difficult thing, this making symbols into words, into sentences, into sentiments and scenes and a world imagined in the mind’seye. The children’s author Lois Lowry recalled it once: “I remember the feeling of excitement that I had, the first time that I realized each letter had a sound, and the sounds went together to make words; and the words became sentences, and the sentences became stories.” The very beginning of a child’s reading is even more primal than that, for it is not so much reading but writing, learning to form the letters that make her own name. Naming the world: it is what we do with words from that moment on. All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.
    The person who changed my life in this way was named Gertrude LoFurno. She was a friend of my parents, and she owned books. This would seem unremarkable to my children, who have grown up in a house in which virtually every room except for the bathrooms is lined with full shelves. But, growing up, I recall very few houses with books, except for the requisite set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
bound infaux leather and conspicuous by their obvious disuse. Although the introduction of mass-market paperbacks at a quarter a copy had forever changed the number of Americans who could afford books, we did not even own very many paperbacks, and I didn’t like them much; I liked a book with a certain heft, a kind of solidity of presentation, something heavy as a sack of sugar.
    My father had a copy of Machiavelli and a book called
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
by a Jesuit named Balthasar Gracián. I owned an illuminated
Lives of the Saints
and a biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and while I recall a period during which I had a fascination with, even a thirst for