Dec 16, 2007 - 04:08:22 CST
We are what we read.I was sitting in my favorite reading spot the other night sipping tea and imbibing sentences from Theodore Roosevelt's "Rough Riders," his 1899 account of his heroics in Cuba. It's a wonderful book, written by a man for whom the glass was always, even in the hard times, not only half but 98 percent full. It is a surprisingly modest book, and generous to all the others who contributed to the success of the expedition, though one of TR's friendliest critics, Finley Peter Dunne, quipped that it should have been titled "Alone in Cuba."
It was one of those lovely occasions when we read purely for pleasure, in a meditative frame of mind, at leisure, pausing to reflect or muse or merely gaze off into space as often as the spirit moves us. The passage I was reading indicated that, in the fetid jungle near Santiago, between battles, in one of the headiest and riskiest moments of his 60-year march, Roosevelt was carefully listening to the life stories of the men he had recruited for the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. I looked up in silence for a few minutes, then said to myself, this is one measure of Roosevelt's greatness. He listened to the rough chaps with whom he shared a campfire in a war zone. He remembered their stories. And he wrote about them in his book.
I happened to be reading Roosevelt at that moment, but later that night I read a chapter from Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," a slender paperback that has been glowering at me from my nightstand for the past couple of months. "Desert Solitaire" is an account of Abbey's time as a ranger in Arches National Park in Utah in the late 1950s. I pulled it off the shelf in September with the intention of reading it immediately, for some urgent reason that I can no longer remember. Life intervened, but now, I'm not sure why, I picked it up when I was winding down for the night, and it spoke to me, all the way from Moab, 1,061.23 miles and half a century away. For half an hour, the book and my imagination took me right into Abbey's wind-rattled trailer in a remote part of Arches National Park, where, from the corner, I watched him pour whiskey into his coffee and rave poetically about the misuse of our public lands.
Think of the magic of books.
A white boy and grown black slave float down the Mississippi River to tease out the possibilities of American freedom. A troubled Catholic priest tacks 95 doctrinal propositions on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on Oct. 31, 1517, and changes the world. A mentally-ill sea captain scours the high seas in search of a white whale he regards as evil.
Think of the infinite variety of worlds that lie behind the covers of books, waiting patiently to be explored.
One million books are published worldwide every year now, a quarter of them in the United States and Great Britain alone. Saudi Arabia publishes fewer than 4,000 books per year, Egypt — once the most civilized nation on Earth — merely 2,215. Somewhere in the world, a new book is published every 30 seconds. As Mark Twain might put it, reports of the death of the book (in favor of the Age of Media) have been very much exaggerated.
Most books look more or less alike. The person sitting across the coffee shop holds a book. What is it? What world is she exploring this morning? It could be the Bible, but it might be the Quran or the "Bhagavad Gita" or the "Analects of Confucius." Think of how different those four portals are, and yet they are all sacred books and they are all about how we ought to align our souls with the divine energies of the universe. She might be reading Dickens' "Bleak House," threading her way through the dank labyrinth of the London legal system in the mid-19th century. But she might just as well be reading a book about breast cancer survivors or a how-to book about quilting. She might be reading "Charlotte's Web," musing sweetly about her childhood and wondering if she will ever have a child of her own. But she might also be reading "Mein Kampf." It could be a Danielle Steele romance, but it also could be Homer's "Iliad" or the autobiography of Lee Iacocca.
There is a scene in Bruce Beresford's film "Black Robe" that reminds us of the magic of the written word. "Black Robe" (1991) explores the coming of Jesuit missionaries to the Huron Indians of New France in the 17th century. In an effort to convince the skeptical Indians of the truth of Christianity, Father Laforgue tells the Huron chief that he can transmit any sentence the chief chooses to utter across the village without sound. The chief speaks a sentence. Laforgue writes it out on a sheet of paper. They walk to the other end of the camp, where Laforgue silently hands the white paper, with its curious black squigglings, to a colleague. The second priest reads out the sentence precisely as it was first uttered. The Huron chief jumps back in wonder and trepidation. These really are medicine men, these black robes.
We take all of this for granted, but, if you think about it, it is the most amazing thing in the world.
There are 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks in the English alphabet. They can be combined to form more than 500,000 words (most of them technical). The greatest of English writers, Shakespeare, had a vocabulary of 29,066 different words. Francis Bacon used more than 20,000 words in his published works. Milton, the best educated of all English writers, used fewer than 8,000 different words in his immense output of poetry and prose. The average American has a working vocabulary of about 2,500 words.
It's all about how writers combine those 26 letters and the words they are able to muster.
I have thousands of books in my library, most of which I have not read, of course. I have never thought about it until this moment, but I have more books than I have anything else, and aside from some photos and intensely personal objects, I cannot imagine anything I would less rather lose in a fire.
And all I have to do to leave my sorry life behind and enter into hundreds, even thousands, of alternative universes, most of which I have never seen and some of which I could never myself imagine, is to pluck one of those books off the shelf, open the door that is its cover and hurtle across the portal as magically as Harry Potter boards Hogswarts Express 5972 at the prosaic King's Cross Station in London.
Tonight, it's James Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson," if my mood holds.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)
rusty9 wrote on Dec 23, 2007 10:41 AM:
The Reverend wrote on Dec 19, 2007 8:58 PM:
Stubborn Fool wrote on Dec 18, 2007 12:45 AM:
ahh yes wrote on Dec 17, 2007 3:17 PM:
pj wrote on Dec 17, 2007 9:03 AM:
William F. Herbel wrote on Dec 16, 2007 10:49 AM:
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