What If?

Abstract

What If? Ruth Jane Roberts (bio) Rereading a favorite book is always a risk, and when the second reading occurs fifty years after the first, it is a particularly chancy action. "What if?" as the children ask. What if the years have brought changed tastes, new insights to the reader? What if the book has become dated by its author's perceptions and attitudes, his style? What if the memory of a sparkling experience turns into the dull reality of boredom? What if a friend (carefully pointing out [End Page 7] that the book and reader are exactly the same age) asks one to reread the favorite and comment on the experience? The book is The Story of Mankind (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921 [1972]) by Hendrik van Loon, which I first read in 1931. I was ten years old, in love with reading, and had just moved to a small town where I could (and did) visit the library every day. Miss Fowles, librarian, grew tired of checking my story books out one day and in the next; and finally, although she said it might be too hard for me, gave me The Story of Mankind. I kept that book a whole week. I expect it was too hard for me; surely it would be too hard for many of today's word-poor ten-year-olds. But what a challenge! What satisfaction when a new word was mastered! What sweet wonder when facts and ideas previously unknown were made clear to me! Rapture is not too strong a word—I was literally and literarily hooked. So it was with some reluctance that I promised my friend (who is half the age of the book) that I would read it again. Now, after re-reading it, I am pleased that I promised. No, of course there is not this time the same glow of discovery. Discovery in the ten-year-old's sense is a one-time event, and even the "new" parts of the book are within my memory. Yet in this reading too there is discovery. I discover in myself an awareness of the magnitude of van Loon's accomplishment. I discover (what if?) my taste has matured, my insights are more precise, and I can now more properly appreciate the overwhelming amount of material Dr. van Loon collected; I can look, awed, at his unerring choices of important people and events. I can recognize his bits of philosophy, understand his insistence on looking behind, before, on both sides of an event to see causes as well as effects. Most of all, I can now respond to his inimitable style with intellect as well as with emotion. Lucid is the adjective that comes to mind. While he often cleverly defines a new word in context, he never condescends to his reader. He says: Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many "big words." I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot write a text-book of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped [sic]. You simply have to learn what those words mean or do without mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now? (p. 221). Over and over van Loon uses fresh metaphors and similes to explain past situations in a modern manner. His prose moves—it runs hops, glides, marches, even soars. And always there is the excitement! I remember being particularly pleased with the definition of the Renaissance. "It was not," Dr. van Loon said, "a political or religious movement. It was a state of mind" (p. 206). Fascinating! I was impressed by his description of famous explorers such as Columbus and Magellan: They set their course by God and by guess. If luck was with them, they returned after one or two or three years. In the other case, their bleached bones remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled with...