Story to read

Apples and Trees – A Sad Short Story by Lisa Lange – Reedsy Prompts

Mom works. She never picks me up from school, and two miles is too close for a bus pickup, which is fine by me because I like cutting through the woods. Especially on autumn days, when the air is cool, and the flies and mosquitos are gone, and basketball practice hasn’t begun. I like the quiet. I like the wordlessness of the walk.

A pretty sugar maple dressed in vivid orange frills beckons me off the path. I stand to look at her. I sound like a weirdo, I know. A sixteen-year-old boy calling a sugar maple pretty. It was Dad that taught me to appreciate trees before he hung himself from one. I love ‘em even more, now, Dad and trees. Did you know the oldest maple is five hundred years old? They call it the Comfort Tree. Dad said all trees are comfort trees.

I search the sugar maple for a perfect orange leaf - I think I’ll press the leaf between two sheets of waxed paper like I did when I was a kid – but I can’t find a perfect orange leaf. It doesn’t matter. We don’t even have waxed paper at home. We don’t save things at home.

I follow a line of golden, round-leaved aspens to the creek, a grove of clone trees grown from the root system of the male. “Aspis means shield in Greek,” Dad said. “Aspens are protectors and inspire courage.” Brave aspens. Magic aspens. I wonder, Dad, did it take courage to kill yourself? Did you care about leaving me?

“Depression is a villain,” the therapist said. “That villain convinced your father the world was better off without him.”

I could have slayed the villain. If I had only told Dad how much I needed him.

I sigh. I try to take a deeper breath. I inhale the dank smell of cold dirt and dropped leaves. I smell Dad, the amalgam of decomposition and old blood. I didn’t know what the smell was when I was a kid. I didn’t know what a medical examiner did. The smell was a thick smell and sweet. I knew, only, that the smell was my dad. I’ve got a friend, Jimmy, who likes the smell of skunks.

My backpack is light, no books, not much homework. With it being the end of the semester and the week before Thanksgiving, teachers don’t add to their piles of ungraded papers. I drop my bag at a willow. I strip a branch of its leaves. I sit on a rock. I pretend to fish.

“Knock. Knock,” I say. “Who’s there?”

“Fish on a hook out of water.”

“Dad? Is that you?”

I reach to unhook him, but he slips through my fingers. How did I let my dad slip through my fingers?

“It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could do.” The therapist said it. Mom said it, but I know Mom doesn’t feel that way.

I keep photographs of Dad in a tackle box. His eyes look sad even as his face smiles. In a birthday photo, we wear matching red hats on our heads, the paper cone kind with the elastic bands that dig under our chins. His body leans into me. His arms hug me enthusiastically. He looks at me. I look at the cake. My mouth is open in the ready position to blow out six candles. I am happy. We were happy. But I see his sadness captured by the photograph. Maybe because his smile looks a little like the same fake smile, I make in all my school pictures. Maybe because his lips are dry and look a little too stretched over his teeth. Or because the corners of his mouth don’t go up into his cheeks in an easy way.

I am seven years too late for more knock, knock, jokes. I am seven years too late to make him laugh, seven years too late to make him happier, seven years too late to give him reasons to stay. I should have made him not want to leave us.

I want to tell Mom that I walk through the woods, but she worries. “Apples and trees,” I heard her say. “I will spend my life trying to keep him alive.” She means me. She means keep me alive. I want to tell her that her burden makes me angry, that it crushes me, that it flattens me. I want to tell her not to worry about me, but I’m scared. I’m scared as if her thought is a premonition.

I pick up my backpack and I follow the creek that leads to the oak tree in the yard, to the black scar on its trunk from where a thick limb once reached upward. I sit on a branch that spreads over the ground. All the oak’s branches have turned toward the ground. “Dad?” I smell decomposition and old blood. I smell the vanilla in the old oak’s tree bark, the smell Dad taught me to notice. I feel the strength in the old oak’s trunk.

In the kitchen I see the bowl full of apples, a white oak bowl full of red apples. It hits me why the bowl is there. Seven years of apples in a white oak bowl sitting on the kitchen countertop and I only, now, see why my mom puts them there. “Apples and trees. I will spend my life trying to keep him alive.” The white oak is Dad. The apples are me.

I pull each apple from the bowl. I line them up on the countertop. Seven apples. Seven years. I inspect each apple for bruises and blemishes. Not a single bruise on any of the apples. It’s a sign, my sign. I am an apple from only the best parts of the tree. I feel taller. I am sure. I’ve slayed the villain that was hiding inside me.

“Mom,” I say, when she walks into the kitchen. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Silence – A Romance Short Story by Thom Brodkin – Reedsy Prompts

There is a peace at sunrise that surpasses all understanding. It's a renewal. A feeling that anything is possible. I’d like to say I drag myself from the comfort of my bed every day to enjoy sunrise’s splendor, but you wouldn’t believe me and I would be lying. What is true is I was there that day and so was she.

There is a connection between sunrisers just because they are sunrisers. It’s a shared, yet unspoken, appreciation for things quiet and beautiful. That might explain why I was immediately drawn to her, but I know it wasn’t just because of the earliness of the morning. Delilah, you see, would have attracted me no matter the time of day.

The first time I saw her I was sitting there, at my favorite secret spot, overlooking Lake Quinault. It’s a hidden gem in Washington State owned by the Quinault Indian Nation and, before that day, if I had my way, no one would ever sit and admire its beauty other than me.

The lake, a destination point for fishermen, swimmers, and sightseers, is nature at its most spectacular. It is located deep in the Olympic National forest. It isn’t easy to find, even if you’re looking for it. Once discovered, even the most magnanimous outdoorsmen will keep the secret to themselves. In an era where, too often, free time is wasted in front of a flat screen TV, Lake Quinault is a reminder of the reasons for taking vacations and the sunrise over the lake is God's definition of must-see.

That particular trip occurred in early summer. I remember it vividly because I had to be in place just after 5:00 a.m. to catch the sun as it appeared over the mountain. Summer is the best time to watch the sunrise because no one in their right mind would be up early enough, nor would be hardy enough to make the journey to my secret spot. No one except me, and Delilah.

“Is this seat taken?”

Not many people can remember the first words spoken by or to the love of their life, but I absolutely can. That morning, as I turned to see from where the unexpected voice was coming, the first light of dawn revealed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Not all men might have thought so. Delilah wore no makeup, a pair of ripped jeans, and a faded brown hoodie. Her hair, perfectly auburn, looked as if it hadn’t been touched since she rolled out of bed that morning. It was obvious she had made no effort to look beautiful and yet she had an inner spark that couldn't be hidden. Not by tattered jeans or a faded hoodie. Something changed that first moment I saw her, I changed. I had spent years guarding my secret spot, and now, surprisingly, unexpectedly, delightfully, I wanted nothing more than to share my sunrise with her.

I, unfortunately, was not born a poet and as such the most romantic thing I could think of in response to her inquiry was: “It’s a free country.” With that, she invaded my secret spot, both next to the lake and in my heart.

The silence that followed was both loud and revealing. Delilah wasn’t there for small talk; she was there to admire the beauty of sunrise. We sat in silence and watched as the sun peeked over the horizon, covering the two of us in its warming light. She and I carried on a conversation without words. She told me, silently, that she understood the importance of the moment, and I responded in kind that this moment was made all the more special because she was there to share it.

Perfection is a goal impossible to realize in this mortal realm, but that morning came as close as is humanly possible. So many thoughts ran through my mind as the sun revealed itself completely. Then just as quickly and quietly as she had come, Delilah rose to her feet, wiped some residual dirt from the seat of her ripped jeans, and headed down the trail and out of my sight.

Eight words verbalized, an infinite number of potential events contemplated. Thirty minutes had passed, a lifetime had been imagined. I was sure I would never see her again, and the thought made me overwhelmingly sad.

The next five years came and went, five long years since that day at the lake. There were first dates, first kisses, and the words “I love you” exchanged, yet every time fate or intention would reach down and sabotage promise. I became determined to find peace in my solitude.

There was always a reason or an excuse for my ending every potential relationship, but at its core was a shared sunrise and a conversation that didn’t happen.

I went to our spot from time to time, to see the sunrise, not for her. At least, that’s what I told myself. I had given up without realizing I was hoping. Hoping to see her again. Hoping to feel what I felt that day. Hoping she would be there. And then it happened. It was once again summer, it was sunrise, but this time she was there.

“Is this seat taken?”

“It’s a free country.”

The same eight words.

At the time, I didn’t know that she, too, had often made the trip back to our secret spot.

Seeing her again, I knew I wouldn’t let the opportunity slip from my grasp, not a second time. When the sun had completed its part in our play, Delilah rose to her feet and wiped the dirt from her jeans exactly as she had done five years earlier. This time, however, I stood up as well.

“My name is Peter. I don’t like coffee, but I’d really like to have a cup with you.”

“My name is Delilah,” she responded, matter-of-factly, “and I would be glad to share a cup of Joe.”

She called it Joe? It’s funny the things that confirm that a love is real. I couldn’t tell her that day, for fear of losing her, but at that moment, I was sure. I had said “I love you” to others before, but it was obvious to me that I had lied. For in that moment, I was finally sure what love felt like.

Lifetimes are only lifetimes when viewed in reverse. A cup of coffee became a dinner date. A dinner date became a commitment. A commitment became a proposal, and a proposal became forever. There were kids and dogs and vacations, but more than anything, there were trips to Lake Quinault. Always at sunrise. Always just the two of us. Never any words spoken.

You never know the last time is the last time until it’s too late. The final trip we took to Lake Quinault was like all the rest. It took a little longer for tired, old bones to make the trek, but we found our spot, sat together, and conversed in silence. The sun, unaffected by time, rose as perfectly as always, but Delilah rose only with my help.

“Would you like to share a cup of Joe?”

She knew I did. She knew sitting next to her pretending to like coffee was my greatest pleasure. She also knew she would never come back to see another sunrise even though I was too stubborn to admit it to myself.

That day in the café, we told stories of family and friends, living and lost, as we sipped on what had eventually become my favorite beverage. We made a mental scorecard of our life and realized we had won.

Two days later I lost her. Just like that first day at the lake, I watched her as she left me alone, this time without even the hope of returning. The sadness I felt from years back flooded over me like a tidal wave.

I’ll save a seat for you. Those were her last words to me. True to myself, I replied: “It’s a free country.” Then, she was gone.

One day, hopefully soon, I will watch the sunrise with my Delilah again only from a far better secret place. Until then, I only go to our special spot at night.

I’m never alone when I go there. I make my way to our clearing and sit down just as I did all those years ago. As the moon reflects off the lake, I feel her comforting hand reach down for me, and in the silence only we understand, I hear her very clearly.

Reading for 15 minutes: "History of Reading" • Arzamas

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History
Art
Literature
Anthropology

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April 10, 2020 Literature, Anthropology

Alberto Mangel is an Argentine writer and publicist, head of the National Library in Buenos Aires. The Ivan Limbach Publishing House publishes a new edition of his book The History of Reading, translated by Maria Junger. Arzamas publishes an excerpt where Mangel recalls how he himself learned to read, and about a chance meeting with the blind Borges, which completely changed his life

Alberto Mangel, researcher, writer and publicist, was born in 1948 in Buenos Aires, but spent the first years of his life in Tel Aviv, where his father served as Argentina's ambassador to Israel. At the age of 16, studying at the National College of Buenos Aires, Mangel works in the Pygmalion bookstore, where he meets Jorge Luis Borges, and in 1964-1968 fulfills the duties of his reader (in the mid-1950s the writer went blind). He will call this period a turning point in his life.

B 19In the 70s, Alberto Mangel lived in France, Great Britain and Italy, where he found the friendly support of Julio Cortazar. He managed to briefly return to Argentina before the 1976 military coup, then went to Tahiti. Mangel collaborated with well-known publishing houses in Paris and London, tried himself in many forms of working with text, including journalism. In 1980, the first edition of his The Dictionary of Imaginary Places was published: this guide to the cities, islands and countries found in mythology and literature will be reprinted many times. nine0004

In the early 1980s, Mangel moved to Canada, where he spent about twenty years. In 1983, he prepared for publication an anthology of fantastic literature "Black Water" ("Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature"). At the same time, Mangel was engaged in literary translation, began teaching and lecturing (which he continues to do today). In 1992, his novel News from a Foreign Country Came won the McKittrick British Literary Award. nine0004

In the early 2000s, Mangel returned to live in Europe, in the French province of Poitou. His legendary library of more than 30,000 books also moves there. Books and libraries as repositories of collective memory is a motif that is always present in his writings.

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I first discovered I could read when I was four years old. Many times I have seen letters which I knew (because I was told so) to form the names of pictures. The boy, drawn in thick black lines, dressed in red shorts and a green shirt (all other images in the book were cut from the same material - dogs, cats, trees and skinny tall mothers), at the same time was three black icons located under the picture , as if his figure was embodied in them: the arm and torso in the letter "b"; round head in "o" and limp crossed legs in "y". <…>

Another reader - probably my nanny - explained the meaning of the letters to me, and now every time I saw a picture of this amazing boy, I knew what the icons under it meant. It was nice, but quickly became boring. The effect of surprise is gone.

And then one fine day from the car window (the purpose of that trip has long been forgotten) I saw a sign on the road. I hardly looked at her for a long time; most likely the car stopped for a moment or just slowed down, and yet I managed to make out large luminous letters, the same as those in my book, but in a combination that I had never seen before. And then I suddenly understood what they meant; I heard them in my head, from black lines on a white background they turned into a reliable, clear, obvious reality. I did it myself. No one helped me perform a miracle. We had a silent, respectful dialogue with the letters. I managed to turn simple lines into a living reality and became omnipotent. I learned to read. <…>

The readers into whose family I have unknowingly entered (we always feel that we are alone in our discoveries and that all our experience, from birth to death, is frighteningly unique), are united by the common art for all of us. Reading letters on a page is just one of its facets. An astronomer reading an ancient map of the starry sky, which now looks very different; a Japanese architect reading the land on which the house will be built to protect it from evil forces; a zoologist reading animal tracks in the forest; a card player who reads his partner's facial expressions before making a winning move; the dancer reading the directions of the choreographer and the audience reading the dancer's movements; a weaver reading the complex pattern of a future carpet; an organist reading the music recorded on the page; a mother reading a child's face in search of joy, fear, or curiosity; a Chinese soothsayer reading ancient signs on a tortoise shell; the lover who reads the body of his beloved in the night under the sheet; a psychiatrist who helps patients read their own frightening dreams; a Hawaiian fisherman reading ocean currents with his hand in the water; a farmer reading the weather in the sky—they all know the art of interpreting signs. Some of these signs were created for a specific purpose by other people (such as musical notes or road signs) - or by gods - like a tortoiseshell or the night sky. Others are random. But, one way or another, it is the reader who understands their meaning; the reader finds reading material in some object, place or event; the reader communicates the meaning to the sign system and subsequently deciphers it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in the hope of understanding who we are and where we are. We read to understand, or at least begin to understand. We simply have no other choice. Reading is as essential to a person as breathing. <…>

After I learned how to spell words, I began to read everything: books, notes, advertisements, tram tickets, letters thrown in the trash, yellowed newspapers found under a park bench, graffiti, magazine covers read by other passengers bus. I understood very well why Cervantes, in his thirst for reading, read "even scraps of paper lying on the street" Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The cunning hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha. Translation by N. Lyubimov .. This reverence for the book (on parchment, on paper or on the screen) can be called the cornerstone of an educated society. Islam went even further: the Qur'an is not only one of the creations of God, but also one of the attributes of God, just like omnipresence or compassion. nine0004

<…> I think I read in at least two ways. There were books that I swallowed whole with bated breath, followed the development of the plot, carelessly neglecting the details, turning the pages at an accelerated pace - this is how I read Rider Haggard, The Odyssey, Conan Doyle and Karl May, the German writer of stories about the Wild West. Others I read very slowly, rereading the text in search of new meanings, enjoying the very sound of the words and what the words hid from me that I suspected was too terrible or too beautiful to remain on the surface. Books of this type - they have something of a detective - I attributed Lewis Carroll, Dante, Kipling and Borges. In addition, I read books in accordance with the impression that I had before reading (according to the author, publisher or other reader). At twelve I read Chekhov's "The Hunt" in a series of detective stories and became convinced that Chekhov was a Russian writer specializing in thrillers. Subsequently, I perceived The Lady with the Dog as a work from the pen of competitor Conan Doyle - and enjoyed it, although I found the intrigue rather transparent. <…>

I wanted to live among books. In 1964, when I was sixteen, I started an after-school job at Pygmalion, one of three Anglo-German bookstores in Buenos Aires. The shop was owned by Lili Lebach, a Jewish woman from Germany who fled the Nazis in the late 1930s. It was my job to dust every single book in the store every day - Lily thought (and rightly so) that in this way I would quickly study the assortment and know exactly where which book was located. <…>

Jorge Luis Borges came into our shop one evening, accompanied by his 88-year-old mother. He was famous, but I only read a few of his poems and stories and was not particularly enthusiastic. Borges is almost completely blind. He refused to use a stick and held out his hands to the shelves as if his fingers could see the titles. He was looking for books that could help him learn Anglo-Saxon, his last passion, and we offered him Skeat's dictionary and The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Maldon, an artistically brilliant historical song of late Anglo-Saxon literature. The real events that served as the basis for the song refer to 991, when, in the reign of King Æthelred the Indecisive, England was subjected to Scandinavian invasions. with comments. Borges' mother began to lose patience. "Oh Jorge," she said, "I don't know why you're wasting your time on Anglo-Saxon instead of learning something useful like Latin or Greek!" Finally he turned to me and asked for some books. Some I found, others I wrote down, and as he was about to leave, he asked if I was very busy in the evenings - he needed (he said this very apologetically) someone who could read to him, because his mother gets tired quickly. I agreed. nine0004

For the next two years, in the evenings, and if I could miss school, then in the mornings, I read to Borges, as did many other lucky people and casual acquaintances. The ritual was the same. Ignoring the elevator, I walked up the stairs (very similar to the one that Borges once climbed with a brand new volume of "Tales of 1001 Nights"; he did not notice the open window and was badly injured, the wound became inflamed, he began to delirium, and it seemed that he goes crazy), called, and the maid escorted me through the curtained door into the small living room, where Borges was already meeting me with a soft hand outstretched for greeting. There were no preliminary conversations; he sat down on the couch, I took my place in the chair, and, slightly out of breath, he offered the program for the evening. “Well, why don’t we take on Kipling today? AND?" Of course, he did not expect an answer. nine0004

In this living room, under a Piranesi engraving depicting Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several articles from the German Brockhaus Encyclopedia, poems by G. Marino, Enrique Bunches, Heine (although he knew the latter by heart, and I hardly he had time to start reading, when his stammering voice intervened and continued from memory; moreover, he stammered only in rhythm, not in words that he knew by heart). Most of the authors I had not read before, so our ritual was very curious: I discovered the text by reading it aloud, and Borges used his ears, as other readers use their eyes, to find a word, sentence or paragraph on the page that will confirm his memory. . During the reading, he often interrupted me, commenting on what he heard in order to (I think) focus on something. nine0004 Jorge Luis Borges. 1977 © Sophie Bassouls / Getty Images

So, for example, stopping me after what he thought was a completely hilarious line from Stevenson's Suicide Club (“Colonel Geraldine was dressed and disguised as a press knight in somewhat cramped circumstances” Robert Stevenson. Suicide Club. Translation by T. Litvinova. - "How can a person be dressed in such a way? What do you think Stevenson meant, given that he is always incredibly accurate? Eh?"), He proceeded to analyze the stylistic device, in which someone or something is characterized with the help of images that seem to be accurate, but in fact force the reader to draw their own conclusions. He and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares played on this idea in a nine-word piece: "Someone is walking up the stairs in the dark: thump thump thump." nine0004

When I was reading Kipling's story "Beyond the Fence" to Borges, he interrupted me after a scene in which an Indian widow sends a message to her lover, composed of various objects. He noted the poetic veracity of this, and wondered aloud whether Kipling himself invented this precise and capacious symbolic language At the time, neither I nor Borges knew that Kipling's messages were not his invention. According to Ignace J. Gelb. The History of Writing [Chicago, 1952]), in East Turkestan, a young woman sent her lover a handful of tea, a blade of grass, a red fruit - a dried apricot, an ember, a flower, a sugar cube, a pebble, a falcon feather and a nut. The message read: “I can’t drink tea anymore, I turned yellow like a blade of grass without you, I blush when I think of you, my heart burns like coal, you are beautiful like a flower and sweet like sugar, is your heart made of stone? I would fly to you if I had wings, I belong to you like a nut in your hand. Note. author.. Then, as if rummaging through a mental library, he compared it with the "philosophical language" of John Wilkins, in which each word is its own definition. <...> Sometimes he used reading in his own work. The ghostly tiger in Kipling's "Forward Rear Drummers," which we read shortly before Christmas, inspired one of his last stories, "The Blue Tigers"; "Two reflections in a pond" by Giovanni Papini led to the appearance of "August 24, 1982 years" - then this date still belonged to the future; the annoyance that Lovecraft caused him (we started and stopped reading his stories dozens of times) led to the emergence of a "corrected" version of one Lovecraft story - it appeared in the Brody Message. Often he asked me to write something down on the flyleaf of the book we were reading - a link to the desired chapter or some thought. I do not know how he used it, but he adopted the habit of writing about books on their pages.

There is a story by Evelyn Waugh in which a man who saved another in the wilds of the Amazonian jungle forces the rescued man to read Dickens aloud to him for the rest of his life See: Evelyn Waugh. A handful of dust. Translation by L. Bespalova .. I never perceived reading to Borges as a simple performance of duty; on the contrary, it was something like a pleasant addiction. I admired not even the texts that he forced me to rediscover (many of them, in the end, became my favorites), but his comments, which shone with the most extensive, but not at all intrusive erudition, were very funny, sometimes cruel, and almost always immutable. I felt like the proud owner of a unique, carefully commented edition, compiled for me personally. Of course, it wasn't like that; I (like many others) was just his notebook, a memo needed for a blind person to put his thoughts in order. And I readily allowed myself to be used in this way. nine0004

Before I met Borges, I always read to myself, or at the very least, others read aloud to me the books I chose. Reading aloud to an old blind man revealed a lot of new things, because, despite the fact that I managed, although not without difficulty, to control the pace and tone of reading, it was Borges, the listener, who had power over the text. I was the driver, but the terrain we were driving through belonged to a passenger who had no other task than to unravel the mystery of the land spread outside the windows. Borges chose a book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted the reading to comment on something, Borges let the words come to him. nine0004

<…> A year before graduation, in 1966, when the military junta of General Ongania came to power, I discovered another system for sorting books. Certain books and certain authors were considered communist and placed on a special list. During constant police raids in bars, cafes, bus stops and just on the streets, the absence of suspicious books mattered as much as the presence of the necessary documents. Banned authors—Pablo Neruda, Jerome David Salinger, Maxim Gorky, Harold Pinter—formed their own history of literature, since the connection between them was visible only to the keen eye of the censor. nine0004 Night of the long clubs. University of Buenos Aires, July 22, 1966 © Universidad de Buenos Aires

But not only the totalitarian government is afraid of reading. Readers are disliked in locker rooms and schoolyards, in prisons and government offices. Almost everywhere, the reading community has a dubious reputation for its high profile and apparent strength. Something about the special relationship between the reader and the book seems wise and fruitful, but on the other hand they imply a certain exclusivity, perhaps because the image of a person huddled in a corner, indifferent to worldly temptations, suggests an impenetrable desire for solitude, selfishness and a certain secret. (“Go live!” my mother used to say to me when she saw me reading a book, as if my occupation contradicted her ideas of what is called life. ) The general fear of what the reader might find between the pages of a book is akin to that eternal horror which men experience in front of the innermost particles of the female body, or ordinary people in front of what witches and sorcerers do in the dark behind closed doors. According to Virgil, the Gate of False Hope is made of ivory; Saint-Beuve believes that the reader's tower is made of the same material. nine0004

Borges once said that at one of the demonstrations organized by the Peron government in 1950 against dissenting intellectuals, the demonstrators chanted: “Yes to shoes, no to books!” The objection "yes to shoes, yes to books" would not convince anyone. Reality - cruel, obvious reality - inevitably had to collide with the fictional world of books. For this reason, and all with great effect, the authorities everywhere tried to exacerbate the artificially created split between reading and real life. Popular regimes need us to lose our memory, which is why they call books a useless luxury; totalitarian regimes need us not to think, and therefore they ban, destroy [books] and impose censorship; both need to turn us into fools who will calmly accept their degradation, and therefore they prefer to encourage the consumption of nonsense. Under such circumstances, readers have no choice but to start an uprising. nine0004

And so I confidently move from my reading history to the history of the reading process itself. Or rather, a story about reading—consisting of various personal circumstances—it will most certainly be just one of the stories, no matter how dispassionate it may be. Perhaps, after all, the history of reading is the history of readers. It even started by accident. In a review of a book on the history of mathematics published in the mid-1930s, Borges wrote that it had one "unfortunate flaw: the chronological order of events does not fit in with their natural and logical order. The definition of the elements of theory often comes last, practice precedes theory, for the unprepared reader, the works of the first mathematicians are less clear than those of their modern colleagues” J. L. Borges. Review of Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell // El Hogar (Buenos Aires). July 8.1938. Approx. author.. Almost the same can be said about the history of reading. Its chronology cannot coincide with the chronology of political history. The Sumerian scribe, for whom reading was the most valuable privilege, felt his responsibility much more acutely than the readers of modern New York or Santiago, since it depended on his personal interpretation how people understood the article of laws or the account. The reading theory of the late Middle Ages, which determined when and how to read, and divided texts into those that should be read aloud and those that read only to themselves, was much more clearly formulated than a similar theory adopted at the end of the 19th century in Vienna or in Edwardian England. <...> The history of reading is not compatible with the chronology of the history of literature, because often the author begins his life in literature not thanks to the first book, but thanks to future readers: the Marquis de Sade was rescued from the dusty closet of pornographic literature, where his books spent more than 150 years , the bibliophile Maurice Heine and the French surrealists; William Blake, about whom no one has heard anything for more than two centuries, has been reborn in our time thanks to Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Northrup Fry - it is thanks to them that his works are now in the curriculum of any college. nine0004

It is said that we, today's readers, are in danger of extinction, and therefore we must finally know what reading is. Our future - the future of the history of reading - was analyzed by Blessed Augustine, who tried to determine the difference between a text conceived and a text spoken aloud; Dante, who wondered if there were limits to the reader's ability to interpret a text; Murasaki Shikibu, who advocated an independent choice of reading order; Pliny, who studied the very process of reading and the relationship between the writer who reads and the reader who writes; the Sumerian scribes, who gave the act of reading political power; early bookmakers who found reading scrolls (similar to the way we use them on our computers today) too clumsy and restrictive, and instead gave us the ability to turn pages and take notes in the margins. The past of this story is before us, and on the last page, as a threatening warning, is the future described by Ray Bradbury in the story Fahrenheit 451, when books were stored in memory, and not on paper. nine0004

Like the process of reading, the history of reading is easily transferred to our time - to me, to my reading experience - and then returns back to distant pages of the past. She skips chapters, scrolls, chooses, rereads, refuses to follow the accepted path. Paradoxically, the fear that contrasts the reading of ordinary life that made my mother take the book from me and drive me out into the street recognizes the sad truth: “You cannot start life again, this one-way trip, after it is over,” writes Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in the book "White Fortress" - but if you have a book in your hands, no matter how difficult it is to understand, after you finish it, you can, if you want, go back to the beginning and re-read it anew, to understand all the difficult places and thus understand life itself" Orkhan Pamuk. White fortress. Translation by V. Feonova..

Reading History, Albro, Albro, Albert

Craig Stevenson

No wonder fate face to face

brought together two different misfortunes,

With a gust of external bad weather
During the seven years of work on the book, a lot of people have accumulated, whom I must thank. The book about the history of reading began with an attempt to write an essay. Katherine Yolles remarked that the topic was worthy of a full-fledged book - and thanks to her for her confidence.

Thanks to my editors - Louis Dennis, the most grateful reader whose friendship has supported me since the days of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places ^[2] .

Nan Graham, who pioneered the book, and Courtney Hodell, whose enthusiasm helped me get it done; Philip Gwyn Jones, who encouraged me by proofreading the most difficult passages. nine0004
Jena Gorrell and Beverly Beetham Endersby painstakingly edited the manuscript in Sherlockian deftness: many thanks for that. Paul Hodgson designed the layout of the book with incredible love and care. My agents Jennifer Barclay and Bruce Westwood heroically kept the wolves out of my door, bankers and tax collectors.

Many of my friends have made significant contributions to the book - Marina Warner, Giovanna Franchi, Dee Feigin, Ana Becci, Greg Gatenby, Carmen Criado, Stan Persky, Simon Vautier. Prof. Amos Lusatto, Prof. Roche Lecourt, M. Hubert Meyer and Fr. F. A. Black kindly agreed to read and correct several individual chapters; All surviving errors are my own. Sybil Isa Tuzlak did some preliminary research. Huge thanks to the librarians who dug up strange books for me and patiently answered my not-so-academic questions at the Toronto City Reference Library, the Robarts Library, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library - all in Toronto, Bob Foley and all the librarians at Banff Center Humanist Library Celeste Library, National Library of Paris, Historical Library of the City of Paris, American Library of Paris, Library of the University of Strasbourg, Municipal Library of Colmar, Huntington Library of Pasadena, California, Ambrosian Library of Milan, Library of London and Saint Mark's National Library of Venice . In addition, I would like to thank the McLean and Hunter Arts and Journalism Program and the Banff Center, as well as the Pages bookstore in Calgary, where individual chapters of this book were read for the first time. nine0004
I could not have completed this book without the help of the Arts Council of Ontario and the Arts Council of Canada and the George Woodcock Foundation.

In memory of Jonathan Warner, whose advice and support I miss so much.

Reader

Reading has a history.

Robert Darnton. For the passion for reading, like all other passions that distract our inconsolable souls, lends itself to analysis. nine0004
Virginia Woolf.

Sir Thomas Browne, 1923

So who's the boss?

Writer or reader?

Denis Diderot.

Jacques the fatalist and his master

Gustave Flaubert.

From a letter to Mademoiselle de Chantepie, June 1857

Young Aristotle, sitting on a comfortable bench, looks through the parchment lying on his knees - one arm is lowered, the other he props up his head. Holding spectacles on his bony nose, a bearded, turbaned Virgil turns the pages of a thick volume in a portrait painted fifteen centuries after the poet's death. Saint Dominic deepened in reading, sitting on a wide step. His hand lightly touches his chin, he is completely deaf to the outside world. Two lovers, Paolo and Francesca, nestled under a tree, savoring the lines of poetry that would decide their fate: Paolo, like Saint Dominic, touches his chin with his hand; Francesca holds the book open, with two fingers laying down a page that will never be read. On the way to medical school, two 12th-century Muslim students stopped to discuss a few passages from one of the books they had taken with them. Pointing to the right page of the book on her lap, baby Jesus explains his teaching to the assembled elders in the temple, who flip through the tomes in shock and disbelief in a vain search for refutation. As beautiful as she was in life, Milan aristocrat Valentina Balbiani flips through the pages of a marble book on the lid of the tomb under the watchful gaze of a tiny dog. Far from the noisy city, among the sands and stones, Saint Jerome, like an elderly passenger waiting for a train, reads a tabloid-sized manuscript, and a lion lies in the corner and listens to him. The great scientist and humanist Desiderius Erasmus shares with his friend Gilbert Cousin a joke read in a book lying on the table in front of him. Kneeling among blooming oleanders, the 17th-century Indian poet strokes his beard, pondering the lines he has just savored out loud. In his right hand he has a beautiful book in a precious cover. Stopping at a long row of simple bookshelves, the Korean monk immersed himself in reading one of the eighty thousand wooden boards of the Tripitaka Koreana—the texts of the Buddhist sutras—which is seven centuries old. "Learn to be silent," advises an unknown artist who created a portrait of the fisherman and essayist Isaac Walton ^[3] reading a book on the banks of the Itchen River, near Winchester Cathedral.

Naked, carefully combed Mary Magdalene, who still did not think to repent, lies somewhere in the forest on a piece of cloth spread on a stone and reads a huge illustrated volume. Charles Dickens holds a copy of one of his own novels in his hands, about to read it to admiring listeners. Leaning on the stone parapet of the Seine embankment, the young man plunged into reading (I wonder what kind of book this is?). An impatient, or perhaps simply tired, mother takes the book from her red-haired son, who runs his finger along the page. Blind Jorge Louis Borges squints, trying to better hear the invisible reader. In a motley forest, sitting on a stump overgrown with moss, a boy holds a small book in his hands. There is silence around, and now he is the lord of time and space. nine0004
They are all readers; their gestures, postures, and the enjoyment and power that reading brings them unite them with me.

I am not alone.

I first discovered that I could read at the age of four. Many, many times I have seen letters which I knew (because I was told so) to form the names of pictures. The boy, drawn in thick black lines, wearing red shorts and a green shirt (all the other images in the book were cut from the same material - dogs, cats, trees and skinny tall mothers), at the same time was three black icons located under the picture , as if his figure was embodied in them: the arm and torso in the letter "b" ; round head in "o" and limp crossed legs in "y" . I drew eyes and a smile on the round face and painted over the empty circle of the body. But there was something else: I knew that the badges not only mirrored the boy, they could tell exactly what the boy was doing. The boy is running, the badges said. He does not jump as I might think, he does not freeze in place and does not play a game whose rules I did not know. The boy is running.

And yet witchcraft was not so exciting as long as it was performed for me by someone else. Another reader - probably my nanny - explained the meaning of the letters to me, and now, every time I saw a picture of this amazing boy, I knew what the icons under it meant. It was nice, but quickly became boring. The effect of surprise is gone. nine0004

And then one fine day from the car window (the purpose of that trip has long been forgotten) I saw a sign on the road. I don't think I looked at her for long; most likely the car stopped for a moment or simply slowed down, and yet I managed to make out large luminous letters, the same as those in my book, but in a combination that I had never seen before. And then I suddenly understood what they mean; I heard them in my head, from black lines on a white background they turned into a reliable, clear, obvious reality. I did it myself. No one helped me perform a miracle. We had a silent, respectful dialogue with the letters. I managed to turn simple lines into living reality and became omnipotent. I learned to read. nine0004
Of course, I no longer remember what the word was on that distant sign (I only remember that there were a few "a's"), but the admiration of understanding what I could only look at before is alive today. It was as if I had a completely new feeling: now the world consisted not only of things that my eyes could see, ears hear, taste my tongue, smell my nose, touch my fingers. There was also something that I could decipher, translate, voice, read with all my being.

The readers, in whose family I entered without knowing it (we always think that we are alone in our discoveries and all the experience we live through, from birth to death, is frighteningly unique), are united by the common art for all of us. Reading the letters on the page is just one of its facets. An astronomer reading an ancient map of the starry sky, which now looks very different; a Japanese architect who reads the land on which the house will be built in order to protect it from evil forces; a zoologist reading animal tracks in the forest; a card player who reads his partner's facial expressions before making a winning move; the dancer reading the directions of the choreographer and the audience reading the dancer's movements; a weaver reading the complex pattern of a future carpet; an organist reading the music recorded on the page; a mother reading a child's face in search of joy, fear, or curiosity; a Chinese soothsayer reading ancient signs on a tortoise shell; the lover who reads the body of his beloved in the night under the sheet; a psychiatrist who helps patients read their own frightening dreams; a Hawaiian fisherman reading ocean currents with his hand in the water; a farmer reading the weather in the sky, they all have the same art of interpreting signs. Some of these signs were created for a specific purpose by other human beings (such as musical notes or road signs) - or by gods - like the tortoise shell or the night sky. Others are random. But one way or another, it is the reader who understands their meaning; the reader finds reading material in some object, place or event; the reader communicates the meaning to the sign system and subsequently deciphers it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in the hope of understanding who we are and where we are. We read to understand, or at least begin to understand. We simply have no other choice. Reading is as essential to a person as breathing. nine0004
I learned to write much later, when I was seven. And he could well live without a letter. But without reading, no. Reading, I found, comes before writing. Society can exist - and many do exist - without writing ^[4] , but no society could survive without reading. According to the ethnologist Philippe Descola ^[5] , societies that do not have a written language have a linear sense of time, while in societies called literate, time seems to accumulate; both types of society exist in different, but equally difficult times, reading the many signs that the world offers them. And even where writing existed, reading preceded writing; the future scribe first had to learn to recognize and decipher the sign system adopted in society, and only then could he use it for writing. In the most educated societies - Islamic, Christian, Jewish, ancient Maya, Buddhist countries - reading is the first step towards socialization; the ability to read became my pass to the world of adults. nine0004
After I learned how to put letters together, I began to read everything: books, notes, advertisements, tram tickets, letters thrown in the trash, yellowed newspapers found under a park bench, graffiti, covers of magazines read by other passengers bus.

I understood very well why, in his thirst for reading, Cervantes read "even scraps of paper lying in the street" ^[6] . This reverence for the book (on parchment, on paper or on the screen) can be called the cornerstone of an educated society. Islam went even further: the Qur'an is not only one of the creations of God, but also one of the attributes of God, the same as omnipresence or compassion. nine0004
Books gave me experience. When later in life I came across events, circumstances, or characters similar to something I had read, it was usually accompanied by a slightly unexpected, but somewhat disappointing sense of deja vu. I felt that I was already experiencing what was happening in other people's words, and I gave it a name. One of the earliest Jewish philosophical texts, written around the 6th century, the Sefer Yetzirah, states that God created the world by thirty-two paths of wisdom. These paths of wisdom are ten sefirot or numbers and twenty-two letters ^[7] . From the Sefirot, all abstract concepts were created, and from twenty-two letters, everything that truly exists in the three spheres of the cosmos: the world, time, and the human body. The universe, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, is a handwritten book consisting of letters and numbers. The key to understanding the Universe lies in the ability to read these letters and numbers and make new combinations, giving life to some part of this colossal text, in imitation of our Creator. (According to a 4th-century legend, the Talmudic scholars Hanina and Hoshaya once studied Sefer Yetzirah for a whole week and eventually, having found the right combination of letters, created a three-year-old heifer, which they subsequently ate for lunch.)

My books were for me translations or interpretations of that great Book. Miguel de Unamuno in one of the sonnets says that the source of time lies in the future; For me, reading gave the impression that I was swimming against the current, living what I once read. The street under the window was full of some malicious people engaged in dark deeds. The desert, which was not far from our home in Tel Aviv, where I lived until the age of six, was a delightful place, because I knew that in its sands, just under the asphalt road, the Copper City was buried ^[8] . The jelly was a mysterious substance whose existence I learned from the books of Enid Blyton, and when I finally tasted the real jelly, it turned out that it was no comparison with that literary ambrosia. I wrote to my grandmother, complaining about some petty grievances, and expected her to give me the delightful freedom that book orphans found when they found long-lost relatives; but, instead of saving me, she forwarded the letter to my parents, who thought my complaints were amusing. I believed in witchcraft and was sure that one day I would get the right to make three wishes - numerous fairy tales have already taught me how not to waste them. I prepared for encounters with spirits, with death and with talking animals, for participation in battles, I made complex plans for traveling to wonderful islands, where Sinbad was to become my best friend. And only many years later, when I first touched the body of my beloved, I realized that there are things that even literature cannot describe. nine0004
Canadian essayist Stan Persky once told me that "the real reader has a million autobiographies" because in every new book we find something of our own lives. “If we read Hamlet year after year and write down our impressions,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “it will turn out that we are writing down our autobiography, because over the years we learn more about life, and Shakespeare only comments on what we know” ^[9] . I take it a little differently. If all books are autobiographies, and they were from the very beginning, then what happened in my life was what I had read about in H. G. Wells, in Alice in Wonderland, in Edmondo de Amicis' sentimental Heart, in adventure Bombs, jungle boy. Sartre describes similar feelings in his memoirs. Comparing flora and fauna from the pages of encyclopedia Larousse with their real-life counterparts, he found that “the apes of the Zoological Garden were far less than apes, the people of the Luxembourg Gardens were far less than human. A Platonist by virtue of circumstances, I went from knowledge to the subject: the idea seemed to me more material than the thing itself, because it was first given to me in my hands and was given as the thing itself. The world first opened up to me through books, chewed, classified, graphed, meaningful, but still dangerous” ^[10] .

Reading provided a reason for solitude, or perhaps created a sense of solitude. As a child, after we moved to Argentina in 1955, I lived in a separate part of the house where a nanny looked after me. Then I liked to read most of all, with my legs up, lying on my stomach on the floor in the children's room. Then the safest and most comfortable place to read was the bed, the hazy zone between sleep and wakefulness. I never felt alone; moreover, on those rare occasions when I met other children, their games and conversations seemed to me much less interesting than what I read about in books. Psychologist James Hillman believes that those who read a lot of fairy tales as children, or those who were read a lot of them, "are in better shape, and the prognosis for them is more favorable than for those who have yet to get acquainted with fairy tales ... Early acquaintance with life is always promising. According to Hillman, the first experiences of reading become “something to get used to and lived through; way in which the soul can find its place in life" ^[11] . That is why I returned to the books I read again and again and will return to them again.

Since my father was a diplomat, we had to travel a lot; books were my home, familiar and comfortable, where I could hide at any moment, no matter how strange the new room seemed to me and no matter how incomprehensible the voices outside the door were. Again and again I turned on the lamp at the head of the bed while my nanny sat at the electric knitting machine or snored on the next bed, and tried to finish the book as quickly as possible, and delay the moment of final parting with it, going back a few pages, rereading especially liked passages, looking for details that I thought had eluded me. nine0004
I never discussed what I read with anyone; the desire to share came later. At that time I was extremely egocentric and felt exactly as Stevenson said:

I am a king, and you should want to:
Bees fly to me to sing,
Swifts fly to me ^[12] .

Each book was a whole world, and in these worlds I tried to find refuge. I knew that I was not capable of inventing such beautiful stories as my favorite authors, and yet I felt that my opinion often coincided with theirs, and (to use Montaigne's words) "tagged along behind them in the distance, mumbling: true, true" nine0147 [13] . Later I was able to separate myself from literature; but in childhood, and sometimes in youth, the most fantastic stories told to me by books, I considered pure truth, as material as the material from which the book itself was made. Walter Benjamin describes something similar. “What my first books were for me - in order to remember this, I first have to forget everything I know about them. And everything that I know about them today undoubtedly rests on the readiness with which I opened myself to them then. And despite the fact that now the content, theme and subject of the book are perceived as something external to her, at that time all this belonged undividedly to her, being no more outside than the number of her pages or paper seem today. The world revealed in the book and the book itself were absolutely united - inseparable from each other at any cost. Because the content of each book, its world was always at hand. But for the same reason, the contents of the book and its world transformed every part of itself. They burned in it, shone out of it, nestled not only in the binding or pictures, but also in headings, drop caps, paragraphs and columns. You didn’t read them, but you lived in them, lived between the lines, and opening them after a break, you were frightened, seeing yourself in the place where you stopped.0147 [14] .

Later, as a young man, in my father's huge abandoned library in Buenos Aires (he entrusted the organization of the library to his secretary, and she bought books in bulk, and then sent them to the bookbinding shop, asking them to adjust to the height of the shelves, so many books have tops pages were cut off, and some even lacked the top lines) I made another discovery. In the giant Spanish encyclopedia Espasa-Calpe, I looked for articles that I thought had something to do with sex: Masturbation, Penis, Vagina, Syphilis, Prostitution. I was always alone in the library, as my father only used it on the rare occasions when he needed to meet someone at home rather than at the office. I was twelve or thirteen; I was comfortably seated in one of the huge armchairs, immersed in an article on the devastating effects of gonorrhea, when suddenly my father entered the room and sat down at the table. For a moment I was terrified that my father would now know what I was reading, but after a second I realized that no one - not even my father, who was sitting just a few steps away from me - could get close to me and find out what the book was talking about. , which I hold in my hands if I myself do not want it. It was a secret miracle that I alone knew about. I finished reading the article on gonorrhea with more glee than shock. Later, in the same library, I completed my sexual education by reading Alberto Moravia's The Conformist, Guy de Cara's The Damned, Grace Metalius' Peyton Place, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. nine0004
There was some mystery not only in the process of reading, but also in how I decided what I would read, rummaging through the shelves of stores in Tel Aviv, Cyprus, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Paris and Buenos Aires. Many times I have chosen books only by their cover. There were moments that I remember even now, such as looking at the vignette-covered dust jackets of the Rainbow Classics series ( World Publishing Company , Cleveland, Ohio) and enjoying the cover hidden under the dust jacket, and drifting away with Hans Brinker from "Silver Skates" (by the way, I did not like this book, I never finished it), "Little Women" by Louise Alcott and Huckleberry Finn. All of these books had forewords by May Lamberton Becker entitled How This Book Was Written, and I still consider them exemplary. “On a cold morning in September 1880, with freezing Scottish rain drumming against the windows, Stevenson pulled a chair closer to the fire and began to write,” said Miss Becker’s preface to Treasure Island. This rain and this fire accompanied me all the time I was reading. nine0004
I remember the window of the bookstore in Cyprus where our ship stopped for a few days, full of colorful book covers about Noddy ^[15] , and the pleasure I had in imagining building a house with Noddy from the bricks painted on the cover. (Later, I didn’t hesitate to enjoy Enid Blyton’s The Wishing Tree series—I didn’t know then that English librarians considered these books “sexist and snobbish.”) In Buenos Aires, I discovered the Robin Hood series. in cardboard covers with a portrait of each character in black paint on a bright yellow background and read the pirated "Tigers of Malaysia" by Emilio Salgari, novels by Jules Verne and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" by Dickens. I don't think I read the cover summary to find out what the book is about; I don’t even know if they even printed summaries on the books of my childhood. nine0004
I think I read in at least two ways. There were books that I devoured whole, breathlessly following plot developments, carelessly ignoring details, turning pages at an accelerated pace - this is how I read Rider Haggard, The Odyssey, Conan Doyle and Karl May, the German writer of stories about the Wild West. Others I read very slowly, rereading the text in search of new meanings, enjoying the very sound of the words and what the words hid from me that I suspected was either too terrible or too beautiful to remain on the surface. Books of this type - they have something of detective stories - I included Lewis Carroll, Dante, Kipling and Borges. In addition, I read books in accordance with the impression that I had before reading (according to the author, publisher or other reader). At twelve I read Chekhov's "The Hunt" in a series of detective stories and became convinced that Chekhov was a Russian writer specializing in thrillers. Subsequently, I perceived The Lady with the Dog as a work from the pen of competitor Conan Doyle - and enjoyed it, although I found the intrigue rather transparent. Similarly, Samuel Butler tells of a certain William Sefton Moorehouse who “imagined he had been converted to Christianity by Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—he confused it with Butler’s Analogy. ”0147 [16] , which a friend advised him to read. This "surprised" him ^[17] . In the story "Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote", Borges suggested that reading Thomas a Kempis's "On the Imitation of Christ" as a work written by James Joyce would "introduce a marked novelty into subtle spiritual instructions" ^[18] .

Even Spinoza in his Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1650 (announced by the Roman Catholic Church as a book “concocted in hell by apostates and the devil himself”), remarked: “It happens very often that we read similar stories in different books, about which we make a completely different judgment due to the different opinions that we have about writers. I once read that a man whose name was Furious Roland used to travel through the air on some winged monster and fly wherever he wanted, as if he alone killed many people and giants, and other fantasies of the same kind, which from the point of view of mind is completely incomprehensible. I read a similar story in Ovid about Perseus and, finally, another one in the Book of Judges about Samson, who, alone and unarmed, killed thousands, and about Elijah, who flew through the air and finally ascended to heaven on fiery horses. and the chariot. These stories are very similar, but we make a far different judgment about each: the first seeks to entertain, the second tells about political events, the third about sacred events.0147 [19] . I, too, had long believed that every book should fulfill a certain purpose, and expected, for example, that John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress would be instructive because I was told it was a religious allegory—as if I could hear what was going on in the author's head at the time of writing the book, and obtain proof that the author was telling the truth. I must say that experience and common sense, in spite of everything, have not yet completely cured me of this superstition.

Sometimes books became mascots: the two-volume Tristram Shandy, the penguin edition of Nicholas Blake's The Beast Must Die, the tattered volume of Martin Gardner's commentary on Alice that I bought (spending all my pocket money for a month) from someone dubious bookseller. These books I read with special fondness and kept for special moments. Thomas of Kempis asked his disciples to “take the book in their hands, just as Simeon the Righteous took the baby Christ in order to nurse and kiss Him. When you have finished reading, close the book and give praise for every word that has come down from the mouth of God; for in the field of our Lord you have found a hidden treasure.” And Saint Benedict, who wrote in those days when there were relatively few books and they were expensive, ordered his monks “if possible ... hold the book with your left hand, wrapping it around the sleeve of your tunic, placing it on your knees; let the right hand serve to turn the pages. Of course, I did not follow the rituals so carefully, but still there was a certain secret solemnity in the process of reading, which I feel to this day. nine0004
I wanted to live among books. In 1964, when I was sixteen, I started an after-school job at Pygmalion, one of three Anglo-German bookstores in Buenos Aires. The shop was owned by Lily Lebach, a Jewish woman from Germany who fled the Nazis in the late thirties. It was my job to dust every single book in the store every day - Lily thought (and rightly so) that in this way I would quickly study the assortment and know exactly where which book was located. Unfortunately, most of the books tempted me too much; they demanded that I pick them up, open them and look through them - sometimes this was not enough. Several times I have stolen the most seductive books; I took them home in my jacket pocket because it wasn't enough for me to just read them; I had to own them, call them mine. Novelist Jamaica Kincaid, admitting that she stole books from a library in Antigua as a child, explained that she had no intention of stealing them: “... just after I read the book, I could no longer think about parting with her” ^[20] .

I discovered too quickly that we weren't just reading Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ^[21] . We read a certain edition, a certain copy, with all the roughness of the paper, with a special smell, with a dried tear on page 72 and a trace of a cup of coffee in the upper right corner of the cover. The epistemological law of reading, derived as far back as the 2nd century and stating that a later text always replaces an earlier one, rarely worked in my case. In the early Middle Ages, scribes often "corrected" errors in the texts they transcribed, thus "improving" them; for me, the edition in which I read the book for the first time became editio princeps ^[22], and all the rest I subsequently compared with him. Typography creates the illusion that all readers of Don Quixote have read the same book. But I still feel it today as if printing had not been invented, and each copy of the book is unique.

Finally, no one will argue with the fact that some books owe their characteristic features to individual readers. Any book contains a history of previous readings - in other words, each reader is impressed by what, as it seems to him, happened to the book before. In my used copy of Kipling's autobiography Something About Me, which I bought in Buenos Aires, there was a handwritten poem on the flyleaf dated the day of Kipling's death. Was the unknown poet a passionate imperialist or a Kiplingian prose lover who could see the artist behind the veneer of chauvinism? My imaginary predecessor had the strongest influence on me, because while reading I was constantly in dialogue with him or her. The book brings its own story to the reader. nine0004
1. Translated by B. Khlebnikov.

2. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980). Ed.

3. Isaac Walton (1593-1683) - author of The Artful Angler, or Meditation for Men (1653) - a bizarre combination of practical fishing advice, a sermon in favor of a peaceful life in the bosom of nature, which the author contrasts with bloody revolutions and civil wars that tormented England in the 17th century. Ed.

4. In The Tropics of Troubles, Claude Lévi-Strauss calls non-literate societies "cold" because their cosmology does not take into account the sequence of events that is the basis of our understanding of history. nine0004
5. Descola Ph. Les Lances du crépuscule: relations Jivaros. Haute-Ama-zonie. Paris, 1993.

6. Miguel de Cervantes. The cunning hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha. T. 1, ch. 9. Hereinafter translated by N. Lyubimov. Note. per.

7. See: Scholem G. Kabbalah. Jerusalem, 1974; and also: Scholem G. Main currents in Jewish mysticism. Bridges of Culture / Gesharim, 2017. Note. per.

8. "Copper City" - a fairy tale from the "1001st night"

9. My translation. Note. per. nine0004
10. Jean Paul Sartre. Words. Translation by Y. Yakhnina and L. Zonina. Note. per.

11. Hillman J. A Note on Story // Children's Literature: The Great Excluded. Vol. 3/ed. Francelia Butler v Bennett Brockman. Philadelphia, 1974.

12. Translated by A. Kozlov. Note. per.

13. Quoted by: Montaigne M. de. On die Education of Children / Montaigne M. de. Les Essais / ed. J. Plattard. Paris, 1947.

14. Op. Quoted from: Pavlov E. Memory shock. M., 2914.
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