"The sun beats down; it is a time for pause."
Summer is a time for pause, time to give heed to that thoughtful inner voice that says, Let go. Loosen up. Do for awhile what you will. Of course, we all have our responsibilities. I did have the task, after all, of crafting this sermon, lest I stand here before you this morning as the most vacated of summer vacations. We all need to put one foot in front of the other to accomplish what must be done on behalf of our jobs, our families, our commitments that don't run out with a change of season. But summer elicits a more reasonable pace, a more lilting rhythm in our habits of life. reading, for example.
Now I would guess-probably not a longshot surmise-that many in this congregation are somewhat addicted to the written word. Or is this impossible, to be somewhat addicted kind of like being a little pregnant? Well then, so be it. Many of us are out and out reading addicts-from the New York Times, to what is brewed and reviewed on the pages of the New York Times Book Review, to maybe even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The fourth and most recent volume of this wildly popular series, welcomed by no less than yesterday morning's big screen in Times Square, has, in the words of bookseller Margo Sage-El, "awakened in children a realization that reading is entertainment." (quote, NY Times, 7/3/00).
Seems to me the All Souls' Women's Alliance is right up there with the most maniacal of those marketing reading as entertainment. Any group that proclaims, "Reading is our summer sport!" is definitely what the English call "around the bend," but perhaps it is a bend worth arcing.
There's a magnetic force at play when I walk into a bookstore without anything particular in mind and after a few moments am drawn towards a tome that carries no surface rationale for intrigue. Yet there I am, picking it up as if predestination were a valid concept after all, leafing through its pages knowing that I must have this book. This wave of inevitability struck most recently during our Annual General Assembly in Nashville, in the narrow aisles of the UUA Bookstore positioned ad hoc in the exhibit space of the Convention Center.
"Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. It was what I used to do through long evenings.Reading was the reward, a solitary, obscure, nocturnal reward. It was what I got everything else out of the way in order to do," writes Lynne Sharon Schwartz. How could I resist a discovery that contained such pearls? And the title, Ruined by Reading, carried a certain irresistible decadence. She's probably a member of our Women's Alliance and doesn't know it.
"Readingwas what I got everything else out of the way in order to do." Summer has a way of melting that "everything else." That matter of what to read thaws out, runs free. Those leftovers from syllabi whose dog-eared pages have long since yellowed are sure winners for reading when there's a chill in the air or the snow blows. But summerthat's a different story.
"The sun beats down.
The schools are out"
That was our cue when, so many years ago, my Mom and I headed to my grandparents' farm, where she spent the better part of a week housecleaning for my Grandmother, bent low with scoliosis. Those were days when domestic parity was not yet a wink in the female eye. So while my Mom toiled away, what was an eight-year-old to do? Of course! Gather those books, take them along: The Five Little Peppers, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Toby Tyler, Mary Poppins. Book in hand, I clambered up those strong-armed trees an easy shout from the front porch, and read the hours away. From this vantage point, I could watch Mary Poppins herself descend on the roof that was at eye level!
Now, my preference is to stretch out on a beach blanket, with the ocean providing the counterpoint of activity. We-often, my children and I-emerge dripping with saltwater from the first round of riding the waves and stretch out with our chosen reading, sunglasses astride our sunscreened noses. Now I must admit that periodically those carefully chosen books are exchanged for an issue of The National Enquirer. I highly recommend it for reading aloud at the beach when your kids have reached the age of hopeless pubescence anyway. It's great grist for a laughfest. But tabloid news demands a short attention span, and we're soon back in the pages of those books, dampened ever so slightly by saltwater. Usually it's two or three books that accompany me to the beach or the poolmy intuitively selected gems of seasonal indulgence.
There are books that have stretched out with me from summer to summer-one poetic saga whose reading spanned three summers. Nikos Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel engulfed me in its fluid verbiage. How can one resist the inveterate Odysseus, molded by the Odysseus-like Kazantzakis, who refused to let Homer have the last word? How can one be daunted by the 33,333 lines of this epic when you are seduced by such Siren-sweet nectar as this?
".memories surge in my heart's root that once, perhaps, once long ago, with yet another boat and crew, with yet another body I moored in this same harbor."
I was swept away.
How is it that in the winter, we curl up with a good book, but summer bids us to stretch out, to shake our cramped limbs and flex outwards? On a cool floor, a terrace lounge, a porch swing, the grass of Central Park, the beach. Libraries all.
Many summers ago I lived and worked 25 blocks north of here. It was my summer of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Clea and a host of other Durrell creatures rose to life and entered mine. For diversion, I turned to Virginia Woolf-The Waves, To a Lighthouse. While the intricacies of plot have long faded in my memory, the sheer beauty of the language moves ever through my subterranean self.
Then there was the summer of The Golden Notebook. Little does Doris Lessing know that she gave me full permission to indulge that inclination that I spoke of earlier-that providence-like attraction to particular books at particular times. Right there on the pages of her prologue:
"'There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.'"
(Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, xviii)
And Lynne Sharon Schwartz chimes in:
"Children generally read what they please, but addictive adultscan get tangled in the toils of choice
.At bottom, of course, the issue in choosing what to read (and what to do and how to live) is the old conflict, dating from the Garden, of pleasure versus duty: what we want to read versus what we think we ought to read, or think we ought to want to read."
How those "shoulds" haunt us-like Calvino's litany of volumes amassed in the frenetic logic of his guilt-inducing bookstore, save of course that singular pearl authored by none other than Calvino himself.
And yes, there are reading's sensual pleasures. The simple physical act of opening a new book, leafing through its pages, smelling the paper. Does each book have its own smell just as each of us has our own smell? I think so. I know my long-owned treasures carry souvenirs of ancient lemonades or coffee or muffins or-okay, mustard! Food and books go hand in hand-literally!
When many summers ago, my husband and I set off for Greece, the physical properties of books loomed as a burden. How to pack all this reading? Why not, I conjectured, devise a book-size laptop of sorts, in which we could insert the entire text of a book and even adjust the screen to our visual capacities? I would call it a Biblio-Tech. I would use it. I would market it. I would sell it. I would get rich. Well, I didn't and I'm not, but such a device is probably in the offing given 21st century technology.
John Updike is already conducting a chorus of protest, of which I am part, in the event of such a "BOOK?" Says Updike:
"Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket or flexible paperback."
".[Yet] expertspredict that the printed, paper-and-glue book will be rendered obsolete by electronic text-delivery systems, of which one, the Microsoft Reader, is already on the market"
(John Updike, New York Times, 6/18/00)
Uh-oh, it's too late! So will Bill Gates e-mail him a "Dear John" letter?
There's no accounting for tastes.
Let's hope The Preacher of Ecclesiastes was also prophetic. In the last few verses of this Old Testament Book we come upon this glimmer of optimism:
"Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find pleasing words, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.Of making many books there is no end."
(Ecclesiastes12:9-12)
There is further reason for optimism. Back to Harry Potter. Would not the Preacher smile broadly in response to the 3.8 million copies that comprise the first edition of this new volume in the series?
"For the moment," reported this morning's Times, "the hottest trend at elementary schools and summer camps is not a video game or a movie-it is an old-fashioned, ink-and-paper book."
(New York Times, 7/9/00, A14)
Wanted books are loved books. And loved books are consumed by readers who do not suffer interference gracefully. I have no doubt that a reader I encountered only a few weeks ago on the Lexington Avenue subway is a case study. With her nose almost touching the page, in through the doors comes a man proclaiming the Gospel of something or other at the top of his lungs. With lungs to match, this woman retorted: "What's the matter with you? Can't you see I'm reading?"
The consumed reader is a tough cookie indeed. The summer reader lightens up a bit, basks in the extended daylight and the balmy evenings as she indulges in her summer sport. In my summer reading I ramble and stretch in my choice of titles, in my depth of engagement, exalting in the sense of expanded time that cradles whatever work has turned my head.
"I thought reading would transform my life, or at least teach me how to live it," recounts the author who is so blessedly "ruined by reading." She continues:
".It does teach something, many things, but not what I naively expected
..what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on. The dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all life's lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present."
(Schwartz, Ruined by Reading, 115-116)
So stretch out or curl up or climb a tree or do whatever you will to bask in the everlasting present of a great summer read.
Carpe diem. Carpe librem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 2000.