As It Goes, Slowly :: January 9th, 2003 ::
I have been slow about it, but I have been reading. Specifically, I have been reading The Spectator Bird, by Wallance Stegner. He’s good, but dense, and reading fifty pages of his stuff cannot be compared to ready fifty pages of, say, Elmore Leonard. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system of any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in the felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years.
The Spectator Bird is a story of a guy who, after a life that might be construed by some as “successful” or “happy,” is coming to grips with the quiet, desparately sad mistakes he has made. That makes the book just as hard to read as its complexity does. Which makes me wonder — I can relate so well to the disorganized mind, complete with the felt-slippered librarian, what does that mean is in store for me in old age?
