Three's The Charm

When you were growing up, did your mother or father call you to do something but you were too absorbed in doing something of your own? Not ignoring them, just really caught up in your moment? Concentration is a powerful thing.

My mother would often call me to come to supper. After lunch I would often spend hours doing the same thing. I frequently didn’t hear her call me, but that didn't mean I was asleep. Eventually I would hear her voice, yes. But I wanted to pretend I hadn't. I had my book and wasn’t hungry. After all, we’d just had lunch, right?

No, often I simply didn’t feel like having supper. I didn't want to stop what I was doing, using my splendid ability to concentrate on the pages before me. Some had words. Others had drawings meant to be colored in using crayons or pencils. The words pretty much always ran out. Those were the pages that tugged at me the hardest, pulling me down below the surface. Summer, winter, any season: I’d rather be reading.

That word immersion was my life for years. Not stopping to ask why things were that way for me, I just followed the impulse: I hid away in books. Slept beside them. Talked to the people inside them. (Not always out loud, but still.). Traveled, in secret, to many places, many countries, a lot of continents. 

Nobody could go to all those places and still have a job, let alone a bank account. Books made it all possible, though. Doors open, pages open, to so many experiences, for very little money or maybe even free.

There was always a place I’d rather be. A place I could get to if I could get my hands on a book. To be honest, whenever I left the house, I had a book with me. Charlie Brown's security blanket, no, wait, Linus was the one with the blanket and thumb stuck in his mouth. I never sucked my thumb. I clutched a book of some sort. One just big enough to be felt through my purse, but not heavy. 

If the day allowed for a few free minutes, I could pour a bit of the book into them, like people carry around nips and chug them when there's dull moment. I'm not much for nips, plus books are better-flavored than booze. You also never find empty covers and spine in back alleys like you often do with beer, gin, or wine bottles once they've been used up.

Sometimes an intense feeling would come, hover around me, because that was the way I felt my place in the world. Churning inside, slight and fragile on the outside. Broken spirit, melancholia? Then take the hand of Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm or Heidi's Alps. Preoccupied, stressed? Then follow the path of The Color Purple or The Dead Zone. The characters in those books will make you glad you’re you. You’d rather be who you are and try to work with what you have. You can learn so much from them, though. Try on a few lives, see how they fit. 

This isn't the only reason for having books at hand. Another important one for me was when sleep left me, eyes wide open yet yearning to follow. I knew when I was wide awake and counting anything available to cure the insomnia. Two, three, four in the morning. Normal hours for me. Each night a hundred years. Eventually I found the best treatment: only books could rescue me from drowning in non-dreams and night-rending obsessions. How did this work, I wondered? Finally it became clear that reading had the ability to sway the eyes and lull thought, would help them stay closed for a few hours. 

The pages often slept on the bed with me and the cat. Words like waves rocked me to sleep.

I would always rather be sleeping with pages. They get wrinkled sometimes, but they're still readable after they've spent an entire night with you. Readable and loveable. But I'm digressing.

Finally it was time to decide what to do in college, what to study, what major to choose. The years had caught me by surprise, but I was ready for the challenge. 

What are you going to do for a living? Where do you want to enroll?

When that question was posed to me, I looked up from the novel in my lap and thought I had to find the exact fit, or I’d never keep a job. What I mean by that is that I had to be expected to read as part of my job. It had to be one of my major responsibilities. What jobs were associated with reading?

Having to read a lot might mean becoming an editor was the ideal career. I hate to inform you that you can’t choose to major in “Editor” or “Reading.” You just imagine somebody carrying out a career, surrounded by books.

That image of being surrounded by books meant I toyed briefly with the notion of becoming a librarian. However, I then thought about how most librarians spend less time reading and more time classifying new acquisitions, digitizing old ones, things like that. Not reading much at all. It must be like torture for them, because they do love books and information, but they're always busy acquiring references, loans articles for other people. Like the Ancient Mariner and his "water, water, everywhere, but ne'er a drop to drink." "Books, books, everywhere, and ne'er a moment to read." Not a great rewrite of the original, but kind of fits.

I love that poem and reread it every so often, by the way.

After discarding the librarian option, and even more quickly that of the archivist, I thought I could and would become a university professor. At that level education courses are not required, so I could instead take more courses in literature, history, languages (so I could read in them, of course). Yes indeed, it was clear: I would study Comparative Literature and teach in an institution of higher education. Believe me, I hated how pompous that sounded and still do hate it, because my one and only motive was to earn a living surrounded by books, near a big library with countless volumes onsite and online. I would be required to read for my job, to teach my classes, to do research, to remain up-to-date in my field.

By now I was thrilled. Because, as I’ve already said: I would always rather be reading if you give me a choice between reading and eating, or reading and going for a walk, or reading and listening to music. Yes, I’d rather be reading. Always. Can you imagine how happy I was to have made up my mind, to have a clear goal in life?

Yes, I’d rather be reading, so I gave my all to my profession. It was pure love, a good fit, a clichéed marriage made in heaven. There were so many stimuli for reading. Visiting lecturers. Noon lunches, often with literary or historical topics that raised one’s curiosity and subsequent reading on the topic discussed at the lunch. Even political debates were fuel for future titles on the "to-read" list. It was never-ending. At least for a little while. Until the sands, or winds, began to shift.

There were lunches on campus or gatherings after poetry readings that led to contacts with other people. The new contacts led to talk about committees, which morphed into committee meetings and their reports. (Somebody had to write them. Usually the readers were willing to produce written material for others. That willingness led to other junkets, all time-consuming and as useless as the administrator who receives them. That results in much less time for reading. 

That's what happened to me. I read less and less, played hooky from my nightly novel sessions, was sleeping badly again, and getting rather miffed.

On top of all that, the office staff was increasingly cut back. There was no time for those working in the department's main office to do anything for professors’ classes. The faculty members who had to prepare materials for the classroom must do so themselves. The staff pretty much fielded calls for the department chair and tended to the photocopier when it needed a new cartridge. 

Next problem: Teaching was becoming less important to the institution than research, because research (especially in the sciences where they don't read a whole lot) brings in research dollars (as the funding is called). This is technically a lot of free money for the institution, which might claim 40% of all grants, leaving the person who wrote the grant and who will do the work, with 60% of the money awarded. Huge commission. Everybody happy, money and egos growing. 

I doubted any of the successful grant writers had a clue as to titles on the New York Times Bestsellers List. None of them had heard of the Booker Prize, The Cervantes Prize, the Prince of Asturias Prize. Not totally ignorant, some of the bucks go-getters probably knew there was a Nobel Prize, just not in Literature. Stuff people read.

"Do you really think that's important?"

"Yes. When we are able to read something that has come from another language and country, words with facets, shine, strings attached, that's when we're able to understand rather than control the assets and liabilities we have. 

I think there should also be a Nobel Prize for Literature for authors who are no longer living. Start wherever and award a prize every year. Best writer in 1600? In 1712? 1776? 1865? But again, I digress. I guess thinking about books just puts me in a dreamy state.

Something else that has also been on the upswing for a generation or more are the increased administrative positions. I suspect they are created when faculty members retire and that the titles never see the inside of one of the committees that abound.. Administrators need lots of committees and commissions to justify their positions. Each committee needs to produce regular reports and data are often collected. Faculty members are expected to serve on committees. If they do a good job, they will be invited more and more to serve. It is an honor, many think. It also devours time and that means less time for books. Certainly no time for extra reading, for ‘pleasure’. That is to be stifled until the summer. Actually, not even then. A lot of really successful grant writers prefer to spend summers in their labs, running 3-D printers of mammoth proportions, or kayaking.

Don't forget: you just don't need a committee to decide on a new administrator with another way of shuffling papers on a desk and deleting emails. You have to fight like hell to retain the position of a retiring professor, to make sure that Shakespeare never dies, that nineteenth century women writers don't become invisible again, to make sense of the new forms of poetry delivery, like sounding.

"You sound like you aren''t pleased with this."

Well, when I started as a professor of literature, it was definitely the best choice, as I just said. Gradually, times got tougher. Library budgets shrank. Fewer speakers gave talks. Fewer plays were staged. The campus bookstore became a shell of its former self. Selling sweatshirts, mugs, and stuffed animals. No books. I kept getting beginning level textbooks from publishers who wanted me to adopt them for classes I didn't teach. A level I didn’t teach. My office shelves filled with uselessness. 

Nor can we forget the metal file cases, the ugliest gray ever, and scratched-cum-rust. Full of files, reports, letters of recommendation, accreditation documents, classroom handouts. Where are the things I can read? I ask and silence responds. All I can do with these things is to file them and forget. Nothing to read and reread, to learn by heart and sometimes feel moved to quote. 

"Well?"

Well, I’d rather be reading. Being a professor of literature takes up far too much of my time, I'm afraid. The seventeen committees, twenty five undergraduate and ten graduate students I advise are also sapping my energy. I don't care who applies to teach here anymore, not even in my own department. Let the chairperson choose. Better yet, let the university's president choose. 

Oh, and I'm not going to write any more fictional letters of recommendation for students I can't remember. I don't want to make up cheap prose that nobody wants to write because it's just a template you paraphrase.. 

I don't want to cross campus to a meeting room whose number I've forgotten to discuss a topic I've forgotten. I don't want to enforce rules and fail students. I especially don't want to smile at a slimy chairperson who never goes to the university library unless it's for coffee at the Faculty Club.

I need to be reading. I always have needed that.

And today, still, I'd rather be reading.

So I will be, soon.

You see, I have submitted my papers for retirement. 

It is never too late to make up for lost time, for lost pages. I think that if my mother calls me for supper now, I am still capable of getting deep down into a well of words and not hearing her.

I don't need to eat. You already know why.