I’ve been thinking about my long friendship with books.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been thinking about my long friendship with books, especially those that altered my life.
Read, Mummy, read.
Have you brushed your teeth?
Yes, so can we read now?
OK, Rickey, up here, patting the bed beside her, next to me.
I crawled up, pressed myself against her body, and handed her the same book I handed to her every night. I’m certain now that she never read the opening sentences; she was quoting them from memory, as I am now, seventy-five years later.
Pecos Bill was a cowboy out in the wild, wild west. He lived with his father and mother and sixteen brothers and sisters in a little log cabin in Texas.
Pecos Bill in Melody Time. Disney. (1948).
What I remember is not her voice or the remainder of the story, but how I felt leaning against her as she read: safe and cherished. This nightly ritual of reading is laid at the base of my history with her, and with books, and forms a foundational piece of who I am.
When I was ten years old I came home from a Billy Graham Crusade meeting at the Hollywood Bowl with a red paperback copy of The Gospel of John. I skipped kickball the next day at recess, leaned against Cherimoya school’s chain link fence, and started with In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . I had no idea what it meant, but it was the beginning of a habit that has lasted a lifetime. I’ve worn out several bibles since. Two years ago, I bought a new translation of the New Testament and read it through as if it were a novel, for characters and stories, not so much for sacred inspiration. Now those stories are my constant reminder of the wisdom, the compassion, the courage of the person to whom I’ve attached my life for seventy years.
I went to high school every day with three important goals in mind, the priority changing throughout each day: to play basketball, to hang out with my friends, and to watch and, if I dared, talk with girls. You’ll note that learning something doesn’t make the list, which is why I graduated with a C+ average. But the semester before graduation, I had an English class with Mrs. Mary Kalnas. Early in the semester she gave us a list of novels from which we were to choose one and write a twelve-page paper on it by the mid-term.
I selected Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and then promptly forgot the assignment until she reminded us about it on the Friday before the Monday it was due. I took the book home after school and, after sleeping in on Saturday morning, began reading. I finished Sunday evening, and on Monday skipped school (not for the first time) and wrote all day long. I turned the paper in on Tuesday, apologizing for Monday’s absence by explaining that I’d had a head-cold all weekend.
She returned our papers on Friday. This is what she’d written across the top of mine: A+. Very good work, Rickey. But you failed to mention the outside sources you used. I was as surprised receiving this grade as she must have been at giving it. I waited until everyone had left the room, then went to her desk. She looked up.
Oh, very good work, Rickey, she said.
Thank you, Mrs. Kalnas, I said. Oh, and I didn’t list outside sources because I didn’t use any.
She nodded slowly, without speaking, staring at me in a way that let me think, maybe for the first time, that I was actually smart.
I transferred to UCLA in my junior year. In one of those semesters, I took a class in The Philosophy of Literature from Hans Meyerhoff, one of the academic Titans in the university’s humanities program. We were expected to have read whatever piece he would lecture on, and I’m guessing all 600-plus students (he was that renowned, so we met in a spacious auditorium in the Chemistry building) had absorbed every page. I know I had, and each piece was a revelation: Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Thomas Mann’s electrifying short story, Death in Venice; absurdist plays by Samuel Becket, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. I felt completely in over my head, so I read and listened and took verbatim class notes like a mad person.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Geothe. (1774).
The midterm exam covered everything we’d read up to then. When the graded blue books (remember those?) were returned after the exam, I took a deep breath before opening to the first page. This was the only marking: 42. I looked at the blackboard: 42 (2) was written up there - only two people in that class of 600 had been given that mark, the highest possible. I closed my blue book to catch my breath, then looked again to be certain: 42.
I grew up with parents who didn’t graduate from high-school, and one of the ways I criticized myself through my twenties and thirties was by acknowledging that, like them, I’d never read The Iliad or The Odyssey. I finally got around to these two essential poems in my thirties. I found the story of one man’s vengeful anger at his rejection by a woman, inflicted on the world as ten years of mutual crushing violence, to be a dangerous illustration of what it means to be masculine. Ah, but Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from the war, back to his beloved Penelope, facing all of life’s temptations and dangers to get to her – for me, this is a parable of the human quest for love and home, and of the courage it takes to make our way there, time and again.
Odysseus and Penelope by Francesco Primiticcio. (1563).
When I joined our [then high-school aged] son in reading The Norton Anthology of English Poetry, I came across Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, and was as stunned by his rendering of the old man’s life after he returns to Penelope as I had been by his original journey. You and I are old, he tweaks me. Then to his former oarsmen,
Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off. . . .
Tho' we are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I keep a copy of the poem beside my chair in the den, and whenever I need a fresh nudge to get on with it, I read the whole damned poem, always pausing to say out loud to myself, Push off.
In 2005, my lifelong friend Rick Hamlin, a New York editor, sent me a copy of JR Moehringer’s memoir, The Tender Bar. Rick thought it would remind me of my own family’s history, and especially of my relationship to my father. It did. It does. I recently read it for the fifth or sixth time, finding in it pieces of myself I’d missed before. His complex, contentious family; a group of men in the sacred space a bar provides them; the pleasure and pain of sexual relationships; the delights and destruction of alcohol; and throughout, moments of love like what I found more often than I might have expected in the tumult of my own growing up. If I get my wish, it will be my final reading assignment before I can no longer turn pages.