IRONIC THAT I'M MAKING READERS OUT OF CLAY

Sitting in my chair with a book on my lap, It’s Marie Howe’s '‘ WHAT THE LIVING DO” a book of poems. These I can read over and over.. I can read an essay or two if they don’t keep going for pages and pages..But I can no longer read anything else from cover to cover. No matter how good it is. I read maybe a paragraph, look down at all the pages still to come, each one covered with words, and just lose heart. I suppose it has something to do with age. A lot of my friends are listening to books on tape. I’m afraid to try that. I have very few actual thoughts so I need to be around when one of them arrives. If I were listening to Moby Dick, I might not have room to squeeze in a single thought of my own. But I decided I would try to  re-read Lawrence Durrell’s “Prospero’s Cell.” There is a sentence in it I have remembered for fifty years: “The taste of olives is as old as the taste of cold water.”

old woman holding a book she isn't reading

It had taken me a long time to like Lawrence Durrell, brother of Gerald, who wrote “My Family And Other Animals,” a book about living on Corfu as a kid, and is one of the most interesting and hilarious books in the world. Lawrence sounded a little haughty, and irritatingly intellectual, in his brother’s book. I remember at one point he opens a box of matches and out pops the scorpion his brother Gerald was keeping under observation.. “Every matchbox a death trap!” Lawrence exclaims. But then I read a collection of letters written between Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller and decided to give him a chance.  Back then, any friend of Miller’s was a friend of mine. So I read the four books of The Alexandrian Quartet, which were all above my head, but I remember liking the last one. This morning I took down my old copy of “Prospero’s Cell” and started to read. I read the first sentence, and closed the book. “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu, the blue really begins.” Oh my god. I didn’t want to read another word, I just wanted to live with that sentence in my head f\orever, so beautiful it was. So now I collect first sentneces.