История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 136 стр.

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– comes before writing. A society can exist – many do exist – without writing, but

no society can exist without reading.

Experience came to me first through books. When later in life I came across

an event or circumstance or character similar to one I had read about, it usually had

the slightly startling but disappointing feeling of déjà vu, because I imagined that

what was now taking place had already happened to me in words, had already been

named.

Reading gave me an excuse for privacy. I lived apart from the rest of my

family, looked after by my nurse in a separate section of the house. My favourite

reading-place was on the floor of my room. Afterwards, my bed late at night

became the safest, most secluded place for reading. I don’t remember ever feeling

lonely. In fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games

and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my

books. The psychologists think that those who have read stories or had stories read

to them in childhood are in better shape and have a better prognosis than those who

haven’t.

***

I wanted to live among books. When I was sixteen, I found a job, after

school, at Pygmalion, one of the three Anglo-German book-stores of Buenos Aires.

The owner was Lily Lebach, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis and settled in

Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. She set me the daily task of dusting each and every

one of the books in the store – a method by which she thought I would quickly get

to know the stock and its location on the shelves. Unfortunately, many of the books

tempted me. They wanted to be held and opened and inspected, and sometimes

even that was not enough. A few times I stole a tempting book and took it home

with me, because I not only had to read it, I had to have it, to call it mine. The

novelist Jamaica Kincaid, confessing to the similar crime of stealing books from