Friday, November 11, 2011

Books about Books



 Currently Reading: Cullum by E. Arnot Robertson



Nathaniel Philbrick’s  (http://nathanielphilbrick.com/) new book, Why Read Moby Dick? provides excellent reasons to read, not just Ahab’s tale, but any great fiction, from any era. He praises the story that is much itself and also another: “The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.”  And yet, the book is also about “America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War...”. 


This duality is exemplified by Nicholas Nickleby, “…when he thought how regularly things went on from day to day in the same unvarying round – how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on – how crafty avarice, and mainly honest hearts were poor and sad – how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down at night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, , and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid – how in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades – how ignorance was punished and never taught – how jail door gaped and gallows loomed for thousands urged toward them by circumstances curtaining their very cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace – how many died in soul and had no chance of life – how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the  crushed and stricken wretch who could scare do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they – had they done ill – how much injustice, and misery, and wrong there was, and yet how the world rolled on from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it – when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thought were bent, he felt indeed that there was little ground for hope, and little cause or reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.“, and yet sometimes, one must be thorough and proceed.    

Are you with me still? 

For contemporary students, hauled at pen-point from their app-encrusted sedation devices, the work of reading such a passage must seem ludicrous. “Whatever for?” they might say, or more likely not say but simply indicate with evermore upward lifting brows.  What will I tell them? To begin, that the story is about tenacity and triumph, and that they will be inspired by young Nicholas and his struggles (or Ahab and his). Oh yes, and that next week there will be a quiz.  Sigh.




No comments: