The Pleasant Dangers of Reading
January 23, 2010
IT HAPPENED WHILE READING A BOOK that I swore never to shave my beard again, unexpectedly becoming a convert to those anathemas which constitute the old ways—that I should look as much like Jesus as I could—me, fifteen and feeling misunderstood and alone again, my face recently smudged with shadowy fuzz, an adolescent rascal encountering my guilt. So for a while it was natural that we should become fast friends, myself and Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov—a perfect fit, reflections. I finished the book in a day.
Actually I had already learned of guilt after thieving that pie with Pip from Mrs. Joe’s, and while runnin’ off with Huck and Jim a few years before that. I still experience confusion remembering my time with Jody Baxter without becoming emotional about the prospects of growing up.
Yes! I love to read, though I’ve taken it for granted, snacking freely on adventures and ideas for the price of a willing mind and heart. To read—the pleasant dangers of considering vicariously what I have not experienced, being granted permission to commit theft and murder; then to share another’s redemption, confession, to seek release; and the gift of full participation in alternate realities, exploring the mystery of written words and the magic of their endless arrangements.
For me, the written word, like paintings, is a mirror—“where who I am see’s what I am becoming…,” as books I read and read again become the “…the gentle witnesses to my transformation….”
“Is that really me?” I often wonder—my frail reason repeatedly flabbergasted by the actualities of my imagination.
I love to read. And because I love to read, I’m hooked on the immediate availability of the Internet and digital media, on the information at my fingertips, on the compelling connection between myself and folks everywhere, and the instant access to webs and links of related data right in the middle my focus. But still, for all of my ecumenical free thinking; the old rite of turning pages bound together along a spine, generous margins for scribbling in, and the paper and ink smell of opening a real book still excite me.
At the university where I teach, sometimes I’m saddened by the impression that cheap entertainment has finally replaced the gift of interpreting the written word—the icy code of text messages, those many unidentified chatters, and other immediate pseudo interactions that are more effectively corporate than individual. I suppose it’s a bit of a paradox that I often type my thoughts first in digital formats before transforming them into orthodox shape and exterior. For some reason—syntax, semantics, spelling, and grammar seem more obvious in type on a screen than in my cursive scrawl. So I sit here feeling more like the place between extremes, the culprit of growing disunion, representing the possible schism between old and new.
(Big sigh!) Ah! My buddy Rodka and I, stuck somewhere in the middle.
