The Great Escape

An old friend told me once it was his parents’ tendency to always bicker that turned him into a bookworm; for him, reading had been the equivalent of slipping on earphones and hearing music by Mozart blot out the tedious squawking of parental bickering.

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When he mentioned he was reading Out of Africa for the first time, I said with a twinge of envy: “How I wish I was able to read that book again for the first time.” If the 10th Mosaic Commandment proscribed other people’s reading experiences as an object to covet, I’d have an onerous spiritual deficit to balance; but more on that in a moment. For me, reading provided an inner escape from the dreary-bleary scenery common to coming of age in a frigid, northern, winter-bound, Canadian mining capital. Sometimes, as a spellbound escapee, I refused to shake off my sweet enchantment while I turned over the pages, clinging tenaciously to a fantasy world engendered by words. My father, a green grocer, used to delegate me to maintain the produce section in his store, but I soon reached for a book and within moments with sublime detachment began mentally navigating the text, oblivious of my surroundings. Father’s chronic frustration with me would boil over and the man would at last tear the book from my hands and forcefully heave it down the aisle. My copies of War and Peace and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had to subsequently be held together with elastic bands until I was able to complete them. The thing is, the man had been the one to dangle before me the rewards of literacy. At age six, as I watched him settle down to read the newspaper every evening after supper I’d curl up alongside him and then pester him to disclose to me the mystery tale below each headline; after all, he was the initiate, the one privy to deep esoteric knowledge, to wisdom. Alas, just one sketchily explained headline was his absolute limit; it hurt a little when he would reject the chance to extend these moments of literary bonding. He would soon leave me to fend for myself. What stayed with me was an aching curiosity regarding the kind of knowledge lay behind all the different headlines. The Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, once described how the great Cervantes would run down the streets to pick up windswept scraps of old newsprint to satisfy his curiosity about whatever news they carried. That, I could relate to. Were a book in process of being read, it would intrigue me even more. Once, on a homeward journey by Greyhound bus through a fierce blizzard, I watched a fellow passenger sitting across from me leisurely weather our slow, tortuous progress while savouring Mario Puzo's 1969 bestselling crime novel The Godfather. He rarely glanced up from the text and, as the leaden hours ticked by, I found myself fending off a raging case of book-envy. The book I had brought along to read on the bus -- Vonnegut’s supremely readable novel, Slaughterhouse House -- had long been put to bed. After a while, I couldn’t glance at my spellbound fellow passenger with his pie-face illumined by the reading light overhead without feeling a range of emotions: resentment and envy, of course, but some admiration, too, for the reader’s capacity for concentration. Ah, what focus! That was 40 years ago, mind you, when such a long attention span, while a bit unusual, was far more common than today -- when tweeting one-liners is all the rage. I twisted myself into a pretzel on the coach's two-seater and tried to sleep. Fade to black. When I came to after a couple hours, I looked over at my travel companion. Sure enough, he still had that bulbous nose of his buried in The Godfather. Enough already! A divorcee I met through work told me once her marriage failed because her ex proved too controlling. Among other signs of domination was his insistence that she not engage in any reading while sitting with him in the evenings; she could knit if she liked, but not read. “Why the difference?” I asked. “He experienced a far greater sense of exclusion if I happened to be reading,” she said. That, too, I could relate to. Watching a reader blissfully daydreaming through pages of a good novel was like being exiled from Oz, like being stuck in Depression-era Kansas. On the beach at the French naval port of Toulon, far from the steppes of Kansas, I once ventured along the water’s edge on a blazingly hot afternoon in late September. Reclining on the sand, with their livres de poche held open and all slick with oil were scores of bathers soaking up the rays of Mediterranean sunshine. Keen to discover what kind of literary fare they were devouring, I cut a path that led me close to where they lay spread out on beach blankets and towels. A young woman in a bikini, with a golden tan and an hourglass figure Brigitte Bardot might have envied, was all immersed in the Louis-Ferdinand Celine classic, Voyage au bout de la nuit. As stories go, this one is as bleak as any, a match for Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Celine’s grim tale of the French soldier who survives the ordeal of trench-warfare during the First World War was the polar opposite of the Club Med setting surrounding us. Had a perverse sense of irony moved this gorgeous creature to opt for such bleak material? Suddenly, she looks up at me, pupils dilating with outrage: She is assuming I’ve been staring down her cleavage. I quickly pivot on my heels and head on down the beach. In French, the woman bellows out the equivalent of “That’s right, you perv! Hit the road, Jack!” With a sheepish sense of dejection, I keep my head down until I am finally off the beach. My quest for a momentary and vicarious literary bonding between fellow readers quashed and turned into an unintended rout. Needless to say, I’ve since grown a lot more circumspect in how I go about taking stock of what other people happen to be reading. Orest Slepokura is a retired schoolteacher, after 30-odd years spent teaching, much of that in Alberta; but also in and around Montreal, as well as in a Native community on James Bay, over in London, England, and Toulon, France. A lifelong reader, Orest continues using much of my time reading books, journals, and newspapers.

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