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| It was a simple story. [a] |
What I did not remember about this book is that it apparently contained no words--my mother, each time she 'read' it to me, would make up the story as she went, using the different characters' voices and changing it a little each time. But she couldn't have changed it that much; for all her imagination, there's only so much you can do with a two-page picture book of Mickey having a surprise birthday party. For whatever reason, I liked hearing the same story over and over again. And I don't believe I was alone in this for kids of that age.
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| I take Calvin to be everyone's representative six-year old. [b] |
However, most kids seem to outgrow this pleasure at reading or hearing the same story multiple times. I never have entirely, though I have moved on to longer books with more words than pictures. It never made sense to me as something to "grow out" of. I've "grown into" more books than I've grown out of, Mickey Mouse notwithstanding, and I never get rid of (and only with great pains give away) old books. Sure, there are some books I read once, with no intention of ever reading again (what my high-school chemistry teacher called "throw-away novels"); then there are other books, like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, that I read the first time through as practice, because I sure as heck didn't understand that bizarre and twisty history the first time I read it in high school (I still don't). I read the Bible twice, and I've been thinking that I should probably read it again; but, as always, time and the number of unread books divert me.
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| At least some of that had to be rereading [c] |
I read a book for the first time, finish it, put it aside. At least one, preferably two or more years pass. Then, out of the blue, something will cause an image from the book to resurface in my mind--maybe a comment on a similar story, an idea, a particularly good conversation. But the memory is hazy, not all there, like a picture I wasn't able to bring into focus in the first reading. So I search for the book. In the process, I come across at least three other books that I have read and set aside, and I look through some of these as well, because I'm not entirely confident of which book the memory is coming from. Eventually I find the right one.
I have a fairly good idea at this point of the specific passage I am looking for. However, barring that I miraculously open the book to that passage on the first try, I've still got a lot of pages to look through; and I'm one of those people who can't look up a word in the dictionary without first reading at least two separate entries, sometimes not even in the correct range of the alphabet. This physical limitation (and context-specific ADD) is absolutely necessary to the process.[1] Because in my search, somehow I already know that the passage I am looking for has changed since I last read it. The words I trust are in all the same places, but the relationship between them, the meaning, has shifted somewhere beneath the level of my consciousness. And while I am (re)reading through the book, searching for that passage, I discover that other parts of the book have done this as well. It's not always significant, sometimes just a small change, but it all seems to point to what I will find when I finally come upon that elusive memory. It's as if the entire book has somehow restructured itself around the missing passage, and when I find it, the entire book will have changed.
I will read paragraphs, pages, full chapters in this way. Sometimes, after I've found the expected passage, I'll keep going and reread practically the whole book. But usually by the time I have found the passage I was looking for, that is enough; what had previously been obscure in my reading has become transparent, and the rest of the book falls into place in my mind. Sometimes I don't even have to search through the book for the passage in question; some new thought will evoke an image so clear and limpid that I know without looking that is what is in the book. I also call this rereading.
Perhaps for a similar reason mnemonic and oral cultures have recently fascinated me. The idea that you could store an entire book not on fallible and misplaceable paper (or velum, or bamboo strips, or clay tablets or what have you), but in your head (not necessarily less fallible but generally less misplaceable) is revolutionary to me[2]; not for the reason that you would never have to reread, but for the reason that you could reread all the time. Every new thought, image, or question could produce a novel(adj.) rereading in your mind.
This is hardly a new idea. Throughout China's late imperial period, probably from the 13th century until the latter part of the 19th century, children memorized the Three Character Classic (三字經), a body of cultural knowledge put into handily memorizable, bite-sized triplets of three characters each (the total number comes out to something over a thousand characters). The first twelve characters are still very widely known in China and other Chinese-speaking communities:
人之初 ，性本善， rén zhī chū , xìng bĕn shàn
性相近 ，習相遠 xìng xiāng jìn , xí xiāng yuán
People in the beginning, are naturally good,
their natures are much the same, their habits become widely different [d]
However, your enterprising, scholarly-hopeful six or seven year old in Ming Dynasty China (1368-1644), or rather your average six or seven year old with enterprising, scholarly-hopeful parents, would memorize the entire thing as their educational primer and be able to recite it long before they could understand all of the content, much of which is significantly less accessible than the first four triplets (though even they have their background in a complex philosophical tradition).[3] But that was its function--because, having the entire text memorized, these six and seven year olds could "reread" it whenever it was needed, as they became eight and nine year olds, ten and eleven year olds, and were acquainted with more and more of the cultural knowledge that would render it intelligible and valuable. To give a small example, here is a translated excerpt from the Three Character Classic:
Of old, the mother of Mencius
Chose a neighborhood
When her child would not learn
She broke the shuttle from the loom [d]
This four-line story is rather elliptic, and, without the accompanying cultural knowledge, probably unintelligible. However, after you read Liu Xiang's Biographies of Heroic Women (written over a millennium earlier, in the Han Dynasty, 206 BCE - 220 CE), it takes on a new meaning.
from Biographies of Heroic Women, collected by Patricia Ebrey
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When Mencius was young, he came home from school one day and found his mother was weaving at the loom. She asked him, “Is school out already?”
He replied, “I left because I felt like it.”
His mother took her knife and cut the finished cloth on her loom. Mencius was startled and asked why. She replied, “Your neglecting your studies is very much like my cutting the cloth. The superior person studies to establish a reputation and gain wide knowledge. [...] If you do not study now, you will surely end up as a menial servant and will never be free from troubles. [...]
Shaken, from then on Mencius studied hard from morning to night. He studied the philosophy of the master and eventually became a famous Confucian scholar. [e]
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At this point, we can assume our aspiring young scholar to have an "Aha!" moment, or at least an appreciative "Ohh", as that enigmatic piece from his elementary textbook reappears in his consciousness, now with its proper significance revealed. This is precisely the sensation I feel when I get to the 'missing' passage in a book I am rereading--I just have to work harder at it. This makes it all worthwhile though, and might be the redemptive quality, at least in some contexts, of that rote memorization we have so denigrated in American schools.
So, for all my fellow rereaders out there, keep rediscovering the books that you love. For all you one-time readers out there, I bear you no grudge, but neither do I envy you your larger libraries (okay, sometimes I do). For me at least, a book in the mind is worth two on the shelf.
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Notes:
[1] I read in my film textbook once that some filmmakers refuse to use digital editing, because traditional methods require them to look through entire spools of discarded film before they arrive at the shot they are searching for. This makes immediate sense to me.
[2] I seem to be going against conventional historical progression here, in which mutable and individual oral history is put into a comparatively permanent and accessible writing (a process that also fascinates me). However, as my example likely makes clear, what I am really taken with here is a written tradition that has been committed to memory.
[3] Some "enterprising and scholarly-hopeful parents" still have their children do this--search Youtube for "Three Character Classic" if you want proof.
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Works Cited:
[a] Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, image found on Google Images
[b] Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, Comic Strip, image found on Google Images
[c] John Allison, Scary Go Round, Webcomic, http://www.scarygoround.com/
[d] "Three Character Classic" (class handout, Beloit College, 2010)
[e] Patricia Ebrey Ed., Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 73.
