Deception and Disappointment
In my early teenage years, whenever I found myself in new surroundings, while everyone else my age was elsewhere making a big racket and carrying on, I would seek out the book shelves in the houses and I would rifle them. I tried to do this when no one was looking. It was more interesting that way, and I thought it was safer, in case I stumbled across something that I wasn't supposed to see.
No one ever was looking, and that led me to wonder why they had all these books in the first place, if they weren't reading them or even putting up safeguards against purloiners like me.
By "rifling" I don't mean I would take any books. I mean I would go through them and try to transfer to my mind any interesting bits of lore and entertainment that they had to offer. But that turned out to be a very risky business. It was, as I saw later, like going through another person's jazz albums. These people had unaccountably bought and stored away a lot of books that I wouldn't have touched, while lacking those of a sort that in my opinion needed to be there. Even worse, when I opened something promising, often I would find that I had been badly deceived and the contents were not at all what I had expected.
In my stepfather's collection I found two offenders that especially stuck in my craw -- I mean my mind. One was Jane Austen's supposed classic, "Pride and Prejudice."
I didn't know that "Pride and Prejudice" had been written in 1813 in England -- way outside my era and setting. Instead "prejudice" was a very big, current, and threatening term in that phase of my life, because it was always used to denote the attitude of much of the majority group toward people like me, my family, and our acquaintances. It referred to the widespread feeling that because of our African ancestry, we were naturally inferior and deserving of very few rights and opportunities. I was always looking for insights on that attitude, because it was so insane.
I had to delve into "Pride and Prejudice" for a good 20 or 30 pages before I saw that nothing could have been farther from Ms Austen's mind than the all-important subject of America's racial situation, in her, my, or any other day. Dumbfounded, disappointed, and even offended by her blatant misuse of that most crucial of words, I wondered if this woman had any conception at all of what "prejudice" meant. It has nothing to do with 19th Century English tea parties!
I eventually set that novel down with deep disgust, and to this day I have never given that or any other work by Ms Austen a chance. My wife, on the other hand, can't get enough of the gentle lady's stuff in books and in movies.
I don't remember the name of the other volume, and if I did remember, you would probably not have read it. It looked interesting because it had lots of pictures of human anatomy.
'Ah-ha!' I thought. I had discovered something on that great, delicious, forbidden mystery called SEX! So, after careful glances around to make sure that I was alone, I started reading this book with almost unbearable anticipation of the stolen pleasures that lay just ahead.
Alas, it was an exploration of a subject that couldn't have been of less interest to me. It was about constipation.
Every couple of years after that I would crack that book again, just to make sure that I hadn't misunderstood something. Surely no one would have been misguided enough -- or constipated enough -- to have written a whole book on it. But I could take another look all I wanted. Those pages would always be purely about that crappy subject.
But I did come away from that tome with one invaluable snippet that I, in my great generosity, will now pass on to you, in case your own lifelong studies on the topic haven't led you to reach the same conclusion. The lower your toilet seat is, the better it is for your elimination channels.
I also made some wonderful discoveries in those "rifled libraries." The best popped up in the books belonging to my cousins in New York. It was a complete set of the short stories of O. Henry. I read the entire collection, and it was great.
A large number of his stories were about grifters and con men. No deception and disappointment there!
No one ever was looking, and that led me to wonder why they had all these books in the first place, if they weren't reading them or even putting up safeguards against purloiners like me.
By "rifling" I don't mean I would take any books. I mean I would go through them and try to transfer to my mind any interesting bits of lore and entertainment that they had to offer. But that turned out to be a very risky business. It was, as I saw later, like going through another person's jazz albums. These people had unaccountably bought and stored away a lot of books that I wouldn't have touched, while lacking those of a sort that in my opinion needed to be there. Even worse, when I opened something promising, often I would find that I had been badly deceived and the contents were not at all what I had expected.
In my stepfather's collection I found two offenders that especially stuck in my craw -- I mean my mind. One was Jane Austen's supposed classic, "Pride and Prejudice."
I didn't know that "Pride and Prejudice" had been written in 1813 in England -- way outside my era and setting. Instead "prejudice" was a very big, current, and threatening term in that phase of my life, because it was always used to denote the attitude of much of the majority group toward people like me, my family, and our acquaintances. It referred to the widespread feeling that because of our African ancestry, we were naturally inferior and deserving of very few rights and opportunities. I was always looking for insights on that attitude, because it was so insane.
I had to delve into "Pride and Prejudice" for a good 20 or 30 pages before I saw that nothing could have been farther from Ms Austen's mind than the all-important subject of America's racial situation, in her, my, or any other day. Dumbfounded, disappointed, and even offended by her blatant misuse of that most crucial of words, I wondered if this woman had any conception at all of what "prejudice" meant. It has nothing to do with 19th Century English tea parties!
I eventually set that novel down with deep disgust, and to this day I have never given that or any other work by Ms Austen a chance. My wife, on the other hand, can't get enough of the gentle lady's stuff in books and in movies.
I don't remember the name of the other volume, and if I did remember, you would probably not have read it. It looked interesting because it had lots of pictures of human anatomy.
'Ah-ha!' I thought. I had discovered something on that great, delicious, forbidden mystery called SEX! So, after careful glances around to make sure that I was alone, I started reading this book with almost unbearable anticipation of the stolen pleasures that lay just ahead.
Alas, it was an exploration of a subject that couldn't have been of less interest to me. It was about constipation.
Every couple of years after that I would crack that book again, just to make sure that I hadn't misunderstood something. Surely no one would have been misguided enough -- or constipated enough -- to have written a whole book on it. But I could take another look all I wanted. Those pages would always be purely about that crappy subject.
But I did come away from that tome with one invaluable snippet that I, in my great generosity, will now pass on to you, in case your own lifelong studies on the topic haven't led you to reach the same conclusion. The lower your toilet seat is, the better it is for your elimination channels.
I also made some wonderful discoveries in those "rifled libraries." The best popped up in the books belonging to my cousins in New York. It was a complete set of the short stories of O. Henry. I read the entire collection, and it was great.
A large number of his stories were about grifters and con men. No deception and disappointment there!
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:27 AM
1 Comments:
Well, maybe.... I like the work of both Paltrow and Emma Thompson. But that English upper class stuff presents a very high, psychological hurdle for me. Thanks regardless for your recommendations.
Post a Comment
<< Home