The truth isn't always beauty,
but the hunger for it is. -Nadine Gordimer, novelist, Nobel laureate
Ray Bradbury wrote “Libraries
raised me” and they raised me as well. Here are some excerpts from my forthcoming
autobiography due out this spring.
#1
“She (A teacher) lit a fire in
me and reading became my passion. I became a familiar figure around the
children’s reading room at the wonderful old Ansonia library. It was built in
1891 as a gift of the fabulously rich Phelps family.
A large building by Ansonia standards, the
library was made of local granite and unglazed red Spanish tiles, with three
towers, natural quartered oak, and stone mosaic floors with representations of
Pegasus and Bellerophon, a Greek hero who specialized in killing monsters. It
had a large fireplace with a chimneypiece of rubbed red Lake Superior
freestone, ribbed barrel-vault ceilings and two tiers of leaded glass windows.
Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge, rested in the gable end of the
roof above the heavy oak doors of the entrance.
I spent hours in the children’s reading room,
perusing the titles, meticulously making my way through picture books meant for
children five years younger than I. But there in the wonderful quiet security
of the library, this place dedicated to learning and reason and knowledge,
where Walter couldn’t lean over my shoulder and berate me, I could take ten or
fifteen minutes to figure out what a word spelled by breaking it apart,
sounding out the parts and putting it all back together again. It didn’t matter
that I was reading baby books.
When I was done dissecting a difficult word,
I went back to the top of the paragraph and read the story, giving myself a
great sense of victory. I was winning the war of words, and, to my joy and
amazement, words weren’t my enemy. Words liked me and I liked them. They taught
me things, and they were witnesses when I won those tiny victories.”
#2
“The world was mine for the reading. I traveled
with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the
Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of
Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and
listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen
death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was
never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second.
I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No
one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or
pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could
get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about that stupid
completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books to walk
slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn’t
do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how much you
read, it’s what you read.
What I
learned from books, from young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne
Frank’s longing for the way her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my
pain. All that caused me such anguish affected others, too, and that connected
me to them and that connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I
loved that odd sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had
ended, and feeling that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.
I read To
Kill a Mockingbird outside the house, because the story concerned race and took a generally
sympathetic view toward blacks, and I knew it wouldn’t go over well.
Walter was an avowed racist and Helen always followed his lead. Neither Helen
nor Walter had lived much beyond their tiny universe, and they had no intention
of broadening their learning. So when I wasn’t reading the book, I tucked it
away in the inside pocket of my Sunday blazer, where, of course, Helen found
it.
And now
Helen was treading carelessly into my private world, and I thought that the bad
guys in the world had it all wrong: You don’t have to burn books to kill off
new ideas and growth. No, all you have to do is to make sure people stop
reading books; it has the same effect.
She was
waiting for me at the door, standing in the vestibule, when I got home from
school, and when I walked in she knocked me a good one over the head with the
book.
“You bring
this crazy Hollywood nigger trash into this house?” she hissed, waving the book
in my face, and then slapped me with it. It was a paperback, it didn’t hurt,
but I blew a fuse anyway.”
#3
“Books and
authors dated eras in my life and threw life-altering concepts at me that
shattered virtually everything I knew to be true, although, on reflection, I
suppose I had only guessed them to be true. I roamed the stacks of the Deep
River library, which didn’t allow St. John’s boys to take out a library card,
so I read what I could between the dimly lit, narrow shelves, always feeling
that I had wasted much of my time by not being there more often. I made great
friends in those books that I found there. I could trust my friends Hemingway
and Fitzgerald and the others who were, and who remain, my most constant
friends. They are always there, offering good counsel and sage advice,
patiently waiting to teach more with every drop of ink.
My purpose
in reading was to learn, so my preference was nonfiction. Books were my
educators, so I tried to read only what I could use later. It was a good
theory, but I scanned everything that interested me, and it seemed that
everything in that library interested me. Discipline and focus leaves me when I enter a library or a
bookstore. It is one of my better bad habits.
Unlike
most teens, I didn’t read to find something to believe in, or to invalidate a
societal truth, or to contradict common knowledge. I read books so I could
weigh and consider what the author was proposing. You learn more that way.”
#4
“I wandered the streets that summer, looking for
something to do when I found the city library, and that was where I escaped
from hell into paradise.
The Silas
Bronson Library was a sleek, modern glass building settled into an expansive
park, a popular cruising area for homosexuals on the prowl and teenage hustlers
willing to help them out for a fee. One afternoon I was sitting on a park
bench, reading, oddly enough, Moby-Dick,
when I was approached by a very respectable-looking man in his late sixties.
“I’m
sixteen, under age,” I snapped. “Go away, or I will call the police.”
He was
outraged, and snapped back, “Then why are you here?”
“To read,”
I said, holding up my copy of Moby-Dick,
although in retrospect that probably wasn’t a good idea.
The
library had a respectable book collection and I spent most of my days haunting
its aisles, scanning the shelves for
titles by the great American novelists. I found most of them, and I usually
devoured them in a day, lying on the bench in the park with my book and one of
my mother’s massive brown-bag lunches.
I
dissolved into the books I found at the library, which could take me places,
answer my questions, and leave me with more questions. I learned the great
truths and common principles from those works, mostly because I had no one else
to teach me those things. Books are great teachers and they teach with ease for
those hungry to learn. And I was learning. I was learning to live with poverty,
the toughest teacher of all because it gives you the test first and the lesson
later. The ancient Greeks called it pathemata mathemata—to learn, eventually, by suffering.”
