Hobbling my weary way, with the tapping stick (the only jaunty thing about my walk) from the underground car park to our rendezvous for lunch in Terrassa, we walked along a couple of streets that were littered with torn pages.
At first, I took the pages for advertising, but then noted that the print was more book like and academic. I then thought that they could be examination papers as the text looked suspiciously question-like and I thought that I could just about make out some equations. I didn’t stop walking, as we were perilously near being late, and I certainly did not think picking one of the pages up seemed like a good idea. So, I kept on walking and let my mind drift.
One of the questionable ‘truths’ that we were fed in school was about academic progress. The range of subjects (between 8 – 10) that we took for examination at what was then called O Level at the age of 16, would we cut down to only three at A Level, and then cut down to one at University. We were also told that this ‘cutting down’ would allow us to focus on those, and then that, subject in which we were most interested.
In my case, that was certainly true, as I ended up studying English Literature in University where I was academically forced to do, what I had always done – that is, read books.
Not everything that I studied in University had my approbation: some of the pre-Chaucerian poetry that we had to study, written in Early Middle English, can still bring a sneer to my mouth and, although I answered a question in my finals where I pretended that I had actually fully read sir Gawan and Þe grene knyȝt
and had something coherent to say about it. For those who have not read this, here are the ‘famous’ opening lines:
Passus I
SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,
Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,
Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt
Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:
So, you will perhaps be a little more sympathetic when I tell you that I concentrated a little more on what I could actually read with some fluency, than deciphering a poem more than 600 years old, like wallowing in the prolixity of nineteenth century novels and worrying about what I was missing in the Modern Literature course that I took for two years!
All in all, I relished what we studied, even if it was logistically impossible to keep up with the relentlessness of an historical approach to literature which gave reading lists that were unfeasibly vast. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have spent all the years since my undergraduate course trying to fill in the gaps that our majestic sweep through literature left!
So, to see a book, any book ripped apart and scattered to the winds, is something I find difficult to take. I have, in my time, to be truthful, perpetrated violence against a book. While reading Jude the Obscure by Hardy, I became so exasperated by the sheer vapidity of Jude that I threw the book against the wall of my room in my Hall of Residence. But I also have to say, that I picked the bloody thing up and continued to read the thing to the end. And I kept the book in my library. But have NEVER re-read it!
I’ve just remembered. I have actually burned a book! I bought a second-hand copy of The Naked Lunch after reading about its notoriety and read it in a sort of state of horrified delight. I could not believe that something so depraved could have been printed. Though I didn’t stop reading it to cast it away, until I had read every word. I then debated what to do with such a potent piece of pornography. As I was still living at home at the time, I could not of course put it on the open shelves of my growing library – what if my parents were to see it! With the amazing double standards of projected innocence, I was more worried about what such stuff would do to my parents, who were obviously not as worldly wise as their young son!
And I burnt the thing! To protect my parents! As if!
It now has a place (a new copy not the burn remnants of the first purchase) on my shelves as an example of an experimental way of writing whose effects are still being worked out in literature today.
So, good, bad, and mediocre, books now moulder (some, quite literally) on my shelves, waiting for my inclination or the current of taste to change to bring them back into my hands to be read.
But I also know that the academic progression, refining its way to your personal point of delight, is not always true.
One guy I knew in College was a mechanical engineer, I was friendly with him, something that did not usually occur between Engineering and The Arts as the two groups seemed to have diametrically opposed viewpoints on virtually everything.
Anyway, we finished our degrees at the same time and, as soon as he had finished his last exam, he piled all his engineering books in a heap and set fire to the lot! And, as he watched the flames mount, he expressed his determination that he would never open another engineering book and that he intended to go into accountancy. Which he did.
I cannot imagine doing anything like that. Three years of a degree (and he got a IIi) in which he did well, and then at the end of it, total rejection.
Perhaps those pages on a Terrassa street were from a similar disillusioned academic – though mid-November is not the time of an academic ending. Perhaps the student (if student it was) had simply had enough and freedom was a paperchase of white page academia on a pavement.
I wouldn’t, couldn’t do that, not even with a Jeffrey Archer novel!
