I spent the summer of my sixteenth year on a farm. By day, I mucked out billets for bulls. By night, I read. When I did either thing, I started at the beginning and ended at the end. (If you’ll excuse the painfully bovine metaphor, I worked through the barn, and pored over the few books at my disposal, ‘from tip to tail’.)
Two years later I went to sea. Aboard my little ship, I spent many a day scraping and sanding bulkheads damaged in a dispute over fishing rights. (One might say that, having just missed the Third Cod War, my younger self served in the ‘Cod Peace’. I, however, would never stoop to such an obvious play on words.)
The laudable custom of putting into port at the start of each weekend meant that I could borrow, or buy, far more books than I had been able to during my rustication. Nonetheless, I continued to read as I did before, starting at the stem and ending at the stern.
When I engaged books in this way, I missed much. Thus, as I made my way through The Lord of the Rings, it took me a while to grok the difference between Sauron and Saruman. Afterwards, however, when reading gave way to research, I ended up missing a whole lot more.
In the four decades that followed my farm-working, seafaring, square-bashing days, I usually found myself within a comfortable commute of a world-class research library. Thus, rather than working my way through one book at a time, I would dip into many. Moreover, as I was usually collecting materials for a book of my own, I devoted my visits to these all-you-can read buffets to a kind of literary gluttony, taking possession of as many pages as time (and my supply of quarter-dollar coins) allowed.
After several hundred of these ‘smash and grab’ Saturdays, I find myself surrounded by an impressive collection of photocopies, filed, with more whimsy than system, in a gross of three-ring binders. (Thanks to an ample supply of Irish ancestors, I possess a license for hyperbole. In this case, however, the count provided, which reflects the all-at-once purchase, in 1995, of 144 units of that paper-holding apparatus, would satisfy the most exacting of stocktakers.)
The cost of this practice lies less in photocopying fees, the price of the loose-leaf notebooks (which set me back but 79 cents apiece, plus shipping and handling), or the cost of the shelves that hold them. (Tusen tak, IKEA.) Rather, in the course of becoming a miner, a burglar, and a librarian of sorts, I had lost of the art of reading complete books.
The Muses gathered to judge my case.
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