Book a flight of imagination

Sep 29, 2019 Countryman, News

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By Dennis Nichols

There once lived a German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer. I don’t know much about him, but I recently read an extract from his essay ‘On books and reading.’ Having been an avid reader in my childhood and youth, I was put off by his argument that too much reading isn’t a good thing, because it causes one to gradually lose the ability to think for oneself.
I would argue to the contrary, and remind those who follow Mr. Schopenhauer’s line of reasoning of this quote by author Fran Lebowitz ,“Think before you speak; read before you think!”
One reason for today’s piece is a general concern that persons, especially children, are reading less in this internet age. Another is to take older readers on a memory trip back to the nineteen sixties and seventies when children actually borrowed and read books from libraries, and you could buy or read ‘comics’ for a few cents. It was the pre-television era in Guyana. A computer was an adding machine, internet and cell phones were nonexistent, twitter and tweet were bird calls, and electronic mail may have conjured up an image of a time-bomb.
As a youth, I tried on occasion to read the works of a few of those considered great philosophers and thinkers through the ages. But words got in the way. So, my mind would either wander or start to go blank, and I would end up with mere snatches of knowledge; glimmers of enlightenment. No flow! But that wasn’t the case with the simpler, funnier, grittier stories of my childhood that I loved – that boosted affection with imagination. Therefore, I could not apologise for finding DC’s Superman more worthy of wonderment than Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
By the age of eight, I was reading stories of Greek myths and tales from The Arabian Nights. These were followed by ‘Around the world in 80 days’, ‘Kidnapped’, ‘Coral Island’, and ‘Treasure Island’, under my father’s guidance. In the quiet hours after school, I would be transported to the Admiral Benbow Inn (In Treasure Island) reading about the fight between the ‘captain’ and a certain ‘Black Dog’ that stirred my boyish spirit of adventure and romance. It was nothing short of magical, and to this day is one of only a handful of memories, I would wish to recapture and relive if it were possible.
By the age of 10 when I started secondary school, I had read a huge number of books. In addition to the few already mentioned, I would’ve read hundreds of ‘comics’ from Archie and Jughead, to the Marvel and DC superheroes, to ‘War’, ‘Commando’, and literature ‘Classics’.
At the national library, we children clamoured for books by Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton (creator of the ‘William’ series) and as teenagers, argued and tussled over ‘Hardy Boys’, ‘Nancy Drew’ and ‘Biggles’. At home, moral rectitude was read straight from the Holy Bible, Aesop’s Fables, and Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, while a more secular view was gleaned from my father’s encyclopaedias and a couple of bawdy magazines, I would occasionally get my hands on.
There were many other books I would have read, in just about every genre, many of which I have simply forgotten. I could probably trace my love of poetry and short stories, for example, to the scores I had read from the ‘Royal Reader’ texts of my parents’ colonial schooling, with their maudlin, motherland sentiments. Others I remember by authorship less than title, including by Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, Poe, Maugham, Twain, London, Christie, and Doyle, among others.
Thus, I owe a great deal of my general knowledge and understanding of human affairs to the books I read in my childhood. Fiction or non, they spoke unfailingly of our relationships with one another; the world of nature, and the world beyond natural phenomena. They helped to interlink all the ideas and experiences that swirled in my mind.
From comic books to encyclopaedias, I soaked up words, ideas, and impressions, and though I failed to distil a life-path from them, they served as an archival trove from which I could retrieve rare jewels – a foil to the bafflement I would later experience as an adult.
One serendipitous benefit of reading for me has been an easy grasp of elements such as grammar, spelling, figurative speech and plot-development in stories. I never ‘learnt’ those things in school, or to read and write in any prescribed manner. They came more or less naturally, until, as mentioned earlier, I collided with the heavy diction some philosophers and learned folk like to use.
Ironically, I have been accused of sometimes using ‘big’ words when simpler ones would suffice, maybe like the second word in the previous, which I however would not consider as such. It is just a long word that perfectly fits its context.
Later, as a teacher and parent, I sought to get my children immersed in reading, mostly light stuff, for comprehension and for fun. I encouraged them to use their curiosity and imagination to understand and enjoy what they read, and I would tell them about some of the books I read as a child. In the seventies and eighties, it was a joy to do so. By the turn of the century, the techno-information age was kicking in locally, and book-reading for too many children, slowly started to fade. And die?
What some feel to be the death of reading may however be a premature assumption. We ‘read’ on the internet and cell phone, don’t we? A lot. Every day. So I get it when a contemporary American school teacher says simplistically but factually, “I don’t think … anyone can doubt that as a society, we read more now than we have at any time in our history, on a per-word basis. Half of the people of the civilised world would have what amounts to the world’s grandest library in their pocket.” True! Many of the books I have mentioned can be found, downloaded, and read online.
Even if that is so, there are just too many other things out there in cyberspace to take you away from a good read, whether from the pages of an actual book, or on-screen. Surfing the net, browsing Facebook, taking ‘selfies’ and making comments, or texting, tweeting, and twittering, do not leave much time for the typical teenager to sink his or her teeth (and mind) into ‘Jane Eyre’ or ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’.
Book-reading by children may also be going the way of the dinosaur and the dodo. If, and before it does, parents, try to get hold of say, a ‘William’ book by Richmal Crompton, or a ‘Famous Five’ by Enid Blyton. Read it to your 10-year-old ‘cyber-children’. See what happens. And don’t be surprised if they unexpectedly become ‘old-fashioned’ readers.
A child’s sense of adventure, fun, and fantasy stirred by a book today, may not be that different from mine when I was a child. Book him or her on a flight of imagination, and watch the take-off. (By the way. Arthur Schopenhauer was often called the ‘philosopher of pessimism’)

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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