Dear Reader,
Each day seems to present another warning: people are not reading
books anymore. Discussions of shrinking attention spans and
leisure time, changing methods of accessing knowledge, the rise
of audiobooks (including specious arguments about audiobooks
not being considered “reading”), the disappearance
of paperbacks – sound the alarm. This has led me to appreciate
my great good fortune in growing up in Buffalo, New York, in
an age when every neighborhood had its own library and having
a mother whose belief was that I could choose books from any
shelf and not be confined to the children’s section. She
was an unselfish reader who would listen to me describe my book,
with an occasional question and without judgment. The problem
is that I cannot recall her telling egocentric me about what
she was reading.
I feel more guilt and awe when hearing about avid readers who
devour dozens of books in any given month. I am a slow reader,
which precludes my entering into a numbers competition. Some
writers have a habit of rereading books, and I started to think
about ones that meant something to me decades ago. Last month’s
blog featured William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, set
in Prohibition Era Mississippi, chosen because one character,
Popeye, terrified me. I wondered why and if he would still have
that effect.
What did rereading Sanctuary after six decades mean?
Another decision to read it aloud slowed me down even more.
I stopped along the way to read about Faulkner and this book’s
place in his journey as a writer. Since my life included becoming
a writer, rereading Sanctuary aloud had a strong effect
on me.
First, because I consider books sacred, I do not write in them
(that rule excluded college textbooks). If I did, there would
have been countless passages feeling the weight of my pen. Instead,
I whooped and hollered my admiration: “Way to go, William
Faulkner!” Two examples: “Motionless, facing one another
like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting
terrific muscular hiatus.” “[Horace] could remember
when, innocent of concrete, the street was bordered on either
side by paths of red brick tediously and unevenly laid and worn
in rich, random mosaic into the black earth which the noon sun
never reached; at that moment, pressed into the concrete near
the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his and his sister’s
naked feet in the artificial stone.”
Second, I admired the respect Faulkner had for the reader when
he decided not to explain Temple Drake’s damning testimony
against an innocent man. The final two paragraphs of the book
describing her walk in a Paris park with her father are a portrait
of brokenness and annihilation.
Third, Faulkner’s “justice” for Popeye felt false,
as if an editor told him to administer it. Spoiler alert: he
is “arrested [and hung] for killing a man in one town and
at an hour when he was in another town killing somebody else…”.
Sixty years ago, I probably felt relief. Today, because EVIL
TRiUMPhs openly every day, I do not believe Popeye could have
been stopped. He would have been out there, terrifying, controlling,
torturing and killing people.
Finally, I would not recommend reading Sanctuary because
Faulkner wrote “masterpieces” more worthy. I would
recommend the practice of rereading books that meant something,
anything to you, for the sake of reflecting upon who you were
then and who you are now.
My current read-aloud is Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”
because I remember being taken with the scrivener’s defining
and maddening response to the narrator’s orders: “I
would prefer not to.” Why did that statement of resistance
appeal to me so much?
