Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Epigraph
- Through the Reader
- Inventing the Reader
- Try Thinking As If Perhaps
- A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction
- Close to the Earth
- Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth
- Edit
- Reading Matters
- Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing)
- Nightshift
- Too Late To Begin?
- Notes
- Index
Too Late To Begin?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Epigraph
- Through the Reader
- Inventing the Reader
- Try Thinking As If Perhaps
- A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction
- Close to the Earth
- Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth
- Edit
- Reading Matters
- Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing)
- Nightshift
- Too Late To Begin?
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Now, it's too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. I'm getting to be a old bird, and I want to take it easy. But I want some reading – some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor's- Show of wollumes’ (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas); ‘as'll reach right down your pint of view, and take time to go by you. How can I get that reading, Wegg? By’, tapping him on the breast with the head of his thick stick, ‘paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an hour (say twopence) to come and do it.’
(Dickens, Our Mutual Friend)With these citations, these references, you authorize the cinder, you will construct a new university, perhaps.
(Derrida, Cinders)Is it too late now, is there time to read in the university? I asked the questions years ago. They were rhetorical and intended to inflame. I knew that the university was in ruins. Still, I had no intention of stopping shovelling and sifting. It was not that I was looking for something in particular. Like Noddy Boffin in my first epigraph above, I wanted some reading, some fine bold reading. But what I loved was not books exactly, it was the dust itself. It was so fine! The thought of ruin encouraged me. I had read (when I dropped into poetry, burningly all at once, a hunger seizing my heart) that my heart is a handful of dust. That I am soft sift in an hourglass. And that this heart, the ‘my heart’ was in the poem and in me, like a letter folded and slipped into a heart, as one slips an imaginary letter into an imaginary breast-pocket, now lost inside, but a letter still, perhaps readable under certain conditions not entirely known to me, certainly not under the jurisdiction of an ‘I’: no longer property nor simply private. The alphabed was deep in my body, the Grandma who sat waiting in it was indeed out of a book.
From long before I had to earn my living or bought a single splendid volume, I lived on, and lived beside, all sorts of phrases and figures from poems and stories.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Without MasteryReading and Other Forces, pp. 134 - 150Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014