FOR THE BIRDS
Edward and I were talking about reading books. We haven’t been doing it, we confessed to each other, and we were ashamed. Not our fault, we said. Parenthood had come in. Speed Racer v. Infinite; Muppets v. Bleak House.
But I did read Alexander’s Really Horrible, Extremely Lonely Day. There was that book.
“It doesn’t count,” Edward said.
Stephen King has been on about it, as well. He’s the one who said I can’t POSSIBLY consider myself A Writer unless I have a book with me at all times – propped on the taps as I do my teeth; swinging from a carabiner as I scale some rock face. Such a nerd.
And, marriage came in as well. All that fashioning and furnishing. Fluffing the pillows, hanging the mirrors; raising the curtains before a table of dinner guests – a steaming pot of bolognaise, an impress-your-friends dessert called Christophe’s Bombe Suprise. Whoever that pompous person was.
There were a few of those bombs actually. And they, too, got in the way of my reading; ripped up the grass a bit, rucked the terrain.
But then, more excuses. Because Edward and I got to talking about age, and the furniture now required to do a basic thing like read.
“You might as well be packing for a camping trip,” he said, and listed the accoutrements needed for the activity: optimally lit room plus angle-poise, contacts plus glasses, book light. And on and on.
“It’s a lot,” he said, forlornly, with a shoulder shrug.
We were talking, as Edward and I always must, on FaceTime.
“I’ve got to do something about this,” I said. I was looking at myself! on the screen and I was plucking at the skin on my neck. It was draping down around my suprasternal notch (not my term) like the elongated folds in a wedding dress. I was distracted; I’d buzzed off on a different tack. A screen was before me and it was sucking me in. Sucking me down a dismal drain of despair.
“We read to know we are not alone,” C.S. Lewis said. And I know he’s right. I mean, something’s got to give, something – surely – has to staunch this achingly lonely Communication Age affliction.
So no, there was certainly no time, these last 20 years, for books! No time for a quiet thing that is a close cousin to thinking. No, there was no time for any of that.
“Go to the tree and read,” my mother would say, and she’d hand me an apple. And that would be the end of it. No ifs or buts. Only her, back to her typewriter, her carbon paper, and her pillow; and me off to the garden with Schopenhauer and a Cox’s in my pocket.
The tree was really a shrub; nothing much, but just big enough for me to perch on a branch, legs an inch or so off the ground. And what did I read there as I munched on my fruit, as I periodically looked up from the page into the leaves and sky of the great London Plane next door? I dunno. Don’t remember. Reading’s for the birds.
AB - 26.1.24