Reader Testimonials

The stories of readers' interactions with books seem evergreen to me. Here are some stories from the Vancouver Sun, Tuesday September 23, 2008. I particularly enjoyed those of Rae Ellingham and Elsie Wollaston.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

This is a new one to me. This is such a sad, wistful, regretful poem about silent strength. I especially like the lines

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;"
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea -- that desert desolate --
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

Literacy and language stability

From E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy.

If you drive in the French Riviera and stop at the town of Menton, you can find small children speaking rapidly in excellent French. Their easy mastery of French grammar and pronunciation will seem charming and enviable. If you then drive east from Menton for just a few minutes and pass over a line painted across the road, you will come to the town of Ventimiglia. There you can find small children speaking charming, enviable Italian. To the children on both sides of the painted line, and perhaps to you, it all seems quite normal: the easy mastery of French or Italian, the arbitrariness of the border, and the fact that the painted line determines which language the children speak. We have come to accept such arrangements as being natural, but from a linguistic point of view they are not. French and Italian, as well as English and all the other national languages, were just as consciously and politically constructed as the national borders that separate them. These standardized national languages were fixed in essentially their present forms by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and (in some countries) nineteenth-century language normalizers who made their decisions, more often than not, at the direction of a central national government. National languages and national borders are codependent artifices. Taken together they have generated one of the most important features of the modern world - the huge, linguistically homogeneous populations of the industrial nations.

That small children should speak Hungarian inside the borders of Hungary (or Polish inside the borders of Poland), and that the language spoken in one place in Hungary should be the same as that spoken in another, is a situation that can exist with such precision only because it is carefully sustained by the Hungarian system of education. Inside a national border, education helps to keep the national languages stable by holding it to standards that are set forth in national dictionaries, spelling books, pronunciation guides, and grammars. In the modern world we therefore find linguistic diversity among the nations but, with a few exceptions, linguistic uniformity inside the nations. This pattern did not arise by chance; it is a self-conscious political and educational arrangement.

Consider the languages of Europe in their natural earlier state, before they were standardized into national literary languages. In the Middle Ages it often happened that only closely neighboring dialects were dependably intelligible to one another. If you traveled four villages away instead of three you might not be able to understand what people were saying. A dialect map for the fourteenth century would show isoglosses marking off domains of mutual unintelligibility between speakers. No linguistic lines were painted across the road; the shifting linguistic borders could be drawn differently, depending on which dialect was used as a base. What's more, these languages changed radically over time. A fourteenth-century Rip Van Winkle waking form a sleep of a hundred - rather than twenty - years might find it hard to understand the speech of his children's grandchildren. The natural law of oral languages is constant change, but that law has been amended by the development of national written languages sustained by national systems of education.

A little more than a hundred years ago, in the 1870's, Henry Sweet, the distinguished linguist who was the model for Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, predicted that in a hundred years the English, Australians, and Americans would be speaking mutually incomprehensible languages because of their great distance and isolation from each other. Sweet was one of the most knowledgeable linguists of his day, and his prediction was one that other scholars of the time would have agreed with. Up to Sweet's time, languages had followed the universal law of constant change. Whenever people who spoke the same oral dialect divided from each other geographically, their languages also came to diverge. That is why, judging by previous linguistic history, Sweet's prediction seemed sound. Before the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, speakers had neither an external standard nor an internal gyroscope to keep their languages stable. Thus, in the eighteenth century Alexander Pope wrote:

Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.

But Pope and Sweet were wrong. We not only understand the British and Australians today and they us, but we are able to read Pope and Dryden, and most American schoolchildren can read Gulliver's Travels by Pope's contemporary Jonathan Swift. The modern English language has turned out to be far more stable than anyone in those days could have predicted. The same has been true of other European languages.

What is special about reading?

Further to Peter Carey's Pure Pleasure, Carey's list of the most pleasurable books to read. In his introduction, Carey has some interesting things to say in, Why Read? A Polemical Introduction

What is special, oddly enough, is the result of an imperfection in the medium books use by comparison with the medium of film or television. Pictures of the sort relayed by film or television are an almost perfect medium, because they look like what they represent. Printed words do not. They are just black marks on paper. Before they can represent anything, they have to be deciphered by a skilled practitioner. Although accustomed readers do it instantaneously, translating printed words into mental images is an amazingly complex operation. It involves a kind of imaginative power different from anything required by other mental processes. If reading dies out, this power will disappear - and the results are incalculable. For reading and civilization have grown together, and we do not know whether one can survive without the other. The imaginative power reading uniquely demands is clearly linked, psychologically, with a capacity for individual judgement and with the ability to empathize with other people. Without reading, these faculties may atrophy. The translation of print into mental images also makes reading more creative than contact with other media, for no book or page is quite the same for any two readers. I do not mean by this that the reader is really the "author" of the text - as it used to be fashionable for critical theorists to pretend - any more than a pianist playing Chopin is Chopin. But a reader, like a pianist, is engaged in an intense creative operation. If you are used to it, you will notice the effort it takes only when you leave off. Put your book aside and switch on the television and the sense of relaxation is instant. That is because a large part of your mind has stopped working. The pictures beam straight into your brain. No input from you is needed. What this means is that a democracy composed largely of television-watchers is mindless compared to a democracy composed largely of readers. Ours changed from the latter to the former in the second half of the twentieth century.

Reading and crowding

Peter Carey is an Oxford professor and British novelist. Among his works is Pure Pleasure, Carey's list of the most pleasurable books to read. In addition to his topic, Carey has some interesting things to say in the introduction, Why Read? A Polemical Introduction

Given the possible scenarios - nuclear war, plague, famine - that can be expected before that point is reached, it may seem footling to speculate about the effect of population explosion on reading habits. But it is clear that, whatever the external disasters, people's attitudes to privacy and solitude are going to change - and that, of course, is where books come in. Reading admits you to an inner space which, though virtually boundless, is inaccessible to the multitudes milling around. This is likely to make it more precious and sought after as ordinary terrestrial space gets used up. At present the gap between people who read books and people who do not is the greatest of all cultural divisions, cutting across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other. To non-readers, readers seem toffee-nosed. To readers, the puzzle is what non-readers fill their minds with. If in tomorrow's densely packed world reading becomes a lifeline to sanity for almost everyone, this gap will close - which will be a good thing for people as well as for books.

To Any Reader (RL Stevenson)

Well this is embarassing. Having posted Stevenson's dedication in his A Child's Garden of Verses I recollected one of his poems which captures some of the magic of reading. I am completely confident that I posted it on the site somewhere but I can't for the life of me find it. Did I just imagine posting it?

Regarldess, here is that magical poem, wherever else it might have disappeared to.

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing around the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.