Take break from (cultural) revolution with good book
With all the anger in America now, the mobs toppling and erasing history, canceling careers, and those sensitivity camps about to begin, I needed escape, and hoped to read something to take my mind off current events. This one sounds just about right: “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” by Edmund Burke.
I hear it’s a perfectly relaxing read about political theologians, and what happens when their abstract ideas meet reality. But I’m told it ends badly, with heads upon the ground. Don’t you just hate when that happens? But where to read it?
Where do you read on a summer day with the rain coming down?
And where did you read as a kid, those years when you first learned the secret of books?
It helps to have a favorite place. A friend’s favorite place to read as a girl was in her parent’s car on road trips.
“The back seat of my parent’s wood-paneled station wagon as we drove to some camping site,” she said.
Another had her own favorite place. “I had these big shelves in my bedroom closet that I could climb up into,” she said. “That was a good spot to hide out and read.”
Or it could have been on the jungle gyms at the playground, or under a tree, where you might have had long Popsicle discussions about books.
Some of you may be indoor readers, in a chair, on a couch. I never had a reading chair. It seems, I don’t know, too Edwardian.
My wife is a night reader, but her light doesn’t bother me. As soon as my head hits those Giza cotton sheets, I’m out. But I get up early, before 5, and from then on, my eyes are on a screen.
I’m talking about the other kind of reading, with a book on paper, and summer, and outside is the right place for me. And so, with Edmund Burke explaining a shape of things to come, I ended up on the back stoop of the
Chicago three-flat where we now live.
I sat on the stairs, out of the rain. Two women walking a fat dog down the alley passed the garage. One said: “And I told her, I says, I really can’t believe you did that … ”
I didn’t want to eavesdrop. You shouldn’t eavesdrop either.
When I was a kid, I’d sit on the back stoop of our two-flat to read. If you read in the house, your mom might find something for you to do, like the dreaded polishing of the silver. You must slip away, quietly.
I had thought about opening “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry, a great novel about cattle drives and Texas Rangers. Unfortunately, these days, if I’m found anywhere near Texas Rangers, even fictional ones, I’m apt to be whisked away to one of those reeducation camps for my sins and canceled.
The cancel culture was the topic of a recent column where I mentioned reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” as a boy. It’s about an America where all books have been banned. If they found you with books at home, firemen would burn your house down.
There was an old woman in it, who had many old books. When it came time for the cleansing fire, she insisted on staying inside, to be burned along with her volumes. She just couldn’t part with them.
If you know the secret of books, you understand her: Every book you read gets locked into you somewhere, waiting to be teased back out. And not every book is a great friend. Some of the best books can be excellent frenemies.
But most good books are friends. The best of them are jealous, and don’t want to share you with anyone. They demand your time. And so, you must slip away with them.
When we’d go down to the family supermarket to work on weekends, our parents might let us slip away with a book. There were Pepsi crates to sit on out back in the cinder alley.
That was a good place to read, until late summer, when the hornets came buzzing for the meat boxes.
In the yard next door there was a mean spaniel with a brutal pink nose. His name was Scaramouche. No matter how many chunks of ham I’d toss him, he’d still growl.
On the corner was the Gage Park library, cool and dark even without air conditioning, and long wooden tables and those smooth, heavy library chairs. There I could read anything I wanted.
These days, I assume children who read are given titles by their teachers, like “A People’s History of the United States,” which, happily, I missed. Or, their phones might offer titles based on their interests, which have all been duly recorded.
But thinking about the long tables in the library, the stacks and those lazy fans, a book I’d forgotten was just teased out of me. It was of a smart, quiet girl named Meg. For some reason there were many smart girls named Meg in books.
This Meg lived in a house on a river. There were two creeks that intersected on the other side of the yard, so technically, she lived on an island. Her dad was kind. Her brother was aggravating. I assume they had adventures. The rest is lost.
Right now, Burke wants my attention. He’s writing a letter to a young gentleman in Paris, in 1789. But it probably has little to do with our present situation.