Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [50]
I didn’t know anyone who thought the NFL should not have played. We needed to carry on, and to be assured that our world had not changed, to see life go on as usual in spite of tragedy.
We needed that then. I think we need it now.
I think the NFL should have played this weekend, and show the world that although things may be different, nothing has changed.
Pierian Dreams
The Conversation
We Are Born Into
I am The Reluctant Scholar. I read slowly. Maybe I have slow eyes, I don’t know. When I was younger I even took a speed-reading course. It was terrible. The technique they were teaching didn’t work on me. I quit after two sessions. I watch people who breeze through a heavy text at lightning speed with the envy that some reserve only for the wealthy.
Because I read slowly, I savor every word, every phrase. I have no time or patience with bad writing or bad ideas. One would think that the slowness with which I digest books would put me off the habit, but it only increases my zeal. I chip away at massive tomes. I can’t read for entertainment the way fast readers can. I save my guilty pleasures for other pursuits: sports, alcohol, rock’n’roll.
My attachment to books is sensual as well as intellectual. A friend of mine once broke my concentration to remark that I will caress a book as I read along. I hadn’t noticed but it’s true: my hands move constantly over the pages. I love to hold them, feel them. I love the way books smell. I will fold a paperback in two and break the spine. I will bend the spine of a hardback, feeling the turned page rend just enough until it rests loosely in position. Like a favorite old dog, the books I have read and loved hang around, sit in my lap, and keep me company. I pull volumes off my shelves that I have combed through a thousand times, their spines cracked, pages slipping from their moorings, and marked by underlines I have made. I’m fussy about those underlines and insist on using a sturdy straight-edged bookmark as an underlining ruler. I have a system of asterisks and paragraph side-lining. I scribble in the margins.
Old books, made on now-antiquated printing presses, have text you can run your fingers across, almost like braille, to feel the impressions left by the printer’s art. I do appreciate a good book cover, too, and have shamelessly purchased many a volume for just that reason. But what I crave most is the liberating compensation of such a sublime labor: reading and learning from what I read. Every time I finish a book, I can honestly say I look up from that last page a different man.
On my last day of college, I was marching across campus after a particularly unpleasant row with a teacher over a grade, on my way into a process I had visited again and again—the meeting with my advisor, then the deputy department head, then the department head, then someone from the dean’s office, to redress my grievance. Suddenly, the wind left my sails, and I stopped in my tracks. It was a brisk sunlit spring morning, the buds on the trees a delicious baby green. Dawn moisture had yet to burn away. Standing there on the pavement between buildings like a rock in a river, students hurrying in both directions in waves around me, I looked down at the books I was carrying. The one on top, which consumed all my attention, was something I was reading for my own edification, required by none of the courses I was taking. And I thought to myself, who are you kidding? Why argue again and again with these people? Are you ever going to win? Can you even survive in this environment? They have their agenda, you have yours. You could walk off this campus right now, go somewhere pleasant, and finish this marvelous book in peace.
And that’s exactly what I did. But first, I went down to the campus bookstore and perused the shelves, not as a frantic student looking to fill his course load, but as a book lover, searching for