The Library of Adventure

Abstract

I am a fast reader who became a slow reader. I started in the fast-reading lane in the sense that I learned to read unusually young and was treated as a freak show for visitors to the Presentation Convent school in Thurles, where my schooling began. No guest—lay or clerical, church canon or Department of Education inspector—was spared what was no doubt a cringe-making display, as I gave command performances from Pear's Encyclopaedia or a gold-edged Lives of the Saints. My greed for words gathered momentum in secondary school with essay competitions, radio scripts, a verse-speaking medal, slogan and caption entries. I read with the obsession of an addict in the grip of an uncontrollable urge. Whatever had been written, I wanted to read. Whatever there was to read, I wanted to have read. Eventually, what there wasn't to read, I wanted to write. At some point in my childhood, I began to ruefully realize that one book a day—adventure novels, biographies of the great inventors, stories of everyday life in distant lands like Norway and France, heroic accounts of missionaries and lifeboat men—would make only a small dent in the stock of the local library. I therefore resolved to double the dose and increase my intake to two books a day, as though I needed a book for each of my avaricious eyes. My favorite reading position was in a large tea chest propped against the smooth bark of a mature laburnum tree; close enough to the backyard rose beds to catch their wafting scent and near enough to the proliferating blackcurrant bushes to warily monitor their progress. The currants, which seemed to increase and multiply at a prodigious— even promiscuous—pace, would need to be picked for jam-making before their plum-colored skins reached seam-bursting ripeness. My tea chest was rendered comfortable by deft deployment of borrowed cushions and a deaf ear to the demands that I clamber out of my shell and—instead of risking cabin fever—help to weed the long thin lettuce and cauliflower beds. I have never lost my sense of urgency about reading, any more than I have gained a sense of urgency about weeding. I sometimes want to bypass the reading process altogether and—reverting to the metaphor of addiction—simply [End Page 9] inject knowledge into my veins so that they might course with whatever wisdom or insight the reading of Proust or Plato, Maria Edgeworth or William Faulkner would confer. But reading is a gratifying act in itself, and one pleads for more time, more life, to get through everything: Amichai to Zabolotsky, Zozimus to Aristotle. My older brother Frank once remarked that "Whenever someone buys a book, they also imagine they are buying the time to read that book"— a sage insight which encapsulates not only the pleasurable anticipation that accompanies the buying of a book but also the depth of our illusions. We feel more learned simply for having bought Tacitus' Agricola or Juvenal's Satires. The volume is handled and fondled, sniffed and shelved, never again in many instances to be disturbed: a bibliographical example of "dust to dust." If living authors received royalties for books read rather than books bought, they couldn't hope to balance their own books. "A poem is never finished, only abandoned," Paul Valéry famously remarked of the writing process. And—of the reading process—one might similarly claim of our frenzied, distracted age, "No book is ever started, only anticipated. . . ." When I say I was a fast reader, I don't mean that I read carelessly or skipped pages. Skipping was an activity in which my sister and her friends specialized—the metronymic beat of their rhymes and the rhythmic thud of their sandaled feet as much a defining part of summer as hoverfly hums and horsefly bites. As a reader, I absorbed every page, eking out the pleasure; but—displaying a youthful conflict of interests&#x02014...