We had dinner at my parents' house last night. I went into the basement to find a certain toy for one of our girls and got stuck with the World Book Encyclopedia, 1968 edition. It had been purchased, I think, in the earnest hopeful expectation that my sister and I would read around in it when questions arose and thus be "improved." And there it was, neatly arranged on a shelf, all volumes in correct alphabetical order, all probably untouched since around 1975. I began thinking of things I'm interested in and looking them up, an exercise that revealed that people probably don't change much after they're around ten. I'd read these articles 40 years ago. They didn't seem very informative now. For authors--Hemingway, for instance--there's not much to the articles beyond the years of birth and death, the titles of the books, a skeletal biography, and a kind of Cliffs Notes summary of "themes." When I was in 8th grade, it must have seemed like reading a "report" written by a more advanced 8th-grader.
The article on Shakespeare is different. It seems there were certain subjects--"Bird" was another one-- more worthy of elaborate attention. I suspect now it was just marketing. "Let's say you want to find out about Shakespeare," I can imagine a salesman saying, and, taking up the "S" volume, revealing to someone like my dad a detailed article twenty times longer than the ones on Cervantes and Chaucer, combined.
Anyway, I'd been through this Shakespeare article before. He's the only author with a section called "famous passages," where I had my first acquaintance with some of the soliloquoys of Hamlet and Macbeth, as well as many pithy utterances that for one reason or another made a particular impression upon me, such as: "If ladies be but young and fair/They have the gift to know it." I got summoned back upstairs just as I had come to these lines from The Tempest:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The World Book doesn't tell you that the speaker is Miranda, a young girl trapped on an island who is seeing human beings for the first time, and that her exuberant speech excerpted in "famous passages" is followed by her father's four-word reply: "Tis new to thee."
I think we have the same basement. My mom sold World Book Encyclopedias for a while... I'm not sure if that was before or after her Amway-selling phase, but now I have a sneaking suspicion she may have been in it for the discount. By college I graduated to basement reading in the library. While I might have been re-shelving periodicals, I occasionally (okay, often)succumbed to the allure of the Life magazines from the 40s... the text of which were probably also written by more advanced 8th graders.
Posted by: Solveig | May 30, 2011 at 11:47 AM