My mother, washing dishes at the sink, stopped and looked at me, too.
“Do you see anything unusual about me?” I said. She didn’t.
I got up and, standing in the middle of the floor, bent my head to one side and said, “Look, my head is swelling!”
My sisters laughed wildly, while my mother cried, “What are we going to do with this silly boy? What are we going to do?”
My knowledge, they assured me, was coming out of my head. And I told them this was not funny at all.
When I went back to the mirror, I liked my face much better. The forehead was showing some wrinkles. Lines were appearing at the mouth. The eyes seemed more in keeping with what might be expected of a thinker or poet. Before I had begun to read, this face certainly had appeared more ordinary—just smooth and clean and nothing else. Now that I had begun to peer a little into the minds of great men, something was entering my soul that reflected itself in my face. I was sure of it. Naturally, the idea that filling my head with knowledge might cause it to burst was nonsense, but I certainly was cramming in an oddly miscellaneous assortment of facts, dates, events, phrases, words, snatches of everything. I never read systematically. I read everything, and I think still that it is simply stupid to tell boys and girls to read certain books between the ages of nine and twelve, other books between sixteen and twenty, etc. I got lost in the paradise of books and it wrecked me forever—destroyed any possibility of my becoming a “successful” man, saved me from becoming a killer in the jungle of material ambition.
I think prescribed reading is the enemy of learning, and today it is probably the end of culture. As a boy, I devoured all the Sax Rohmer mysteries, the Rover Boys, the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Men of Mars and the Tarzan series; I read Penrod and Sam, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer—all with equal enthusiasm. This is where it begins. Taste can come later.
There is a certain point, once enthusiasm is engendered, when a good teacher can open doors for you. I had such a teacher, and later a friend, in Jesse Feldman. His enthusiasm supported my own, and at the same time he held the key to the wealth of possibilities that literature offers. He was a scholar, but his real scholarship resided in his love for people. He believed ideas could change human hearts. He inspired me by making me wonder about everything. He showed me that the worst sin of which I might be capable would be to become indifferent to the human spirit.
It was Jesse who introduced me to Jack London’s Martin Eden. I was seventeen. Then Les Miserables, Nana, and Anna Karenina set me off like a forest fire. There was no stopping me. I had to read everything. I plunged into Hardy’s Return of the Native with pencil in hand, underlining and writing my thoughts in the margins. I loved to argue with the author and the need to make notations made it terribly important to own my own books, no matter how long it took to save the money to buy them. It was fun to look at books, to touch them, to think of the next purchase.
I read Dickens until I couldn’t see straight. I read Goethe’s Faust and thought secretly that the author was a pompous ass. Years later I again read it and became fascinated with the entire Faustian legend. This is the way it should be. You don’t have to get it the first time.