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Books That I Loved As A Boy
by
“This is rather a disquieting thought, my Uncle Peter,” said I, “for it seems to leave us all adrift on a sea of illusions.”
“Not if you look at it in the right way,” he answered, placidly. “We can always get at a few more facts than the man himself gives us, from letters and from the dispassionate recollections of his friends. Besides, a man’s view of what his life ought to have been is almost as interesting, and quite as instructive, as a mere chronicle of what it actually was. The truth is, there are two kinds of truth: one kind is—-“
Crash! went the fire-irons, tumbling in brazen confusion on the red-brick hearth. When my Uncle Peter has mounted his favourite metaphysical theory, I know that nothing can make him dismount but physical violence. I apologized for the poker and the shovel and the tongs (practising a Stevensonian omission in regard to my own share in the catastrophe), arranged the offending members in their proper station on the left of the fire-place, and took the bellows to encourage the dull fire into a more concrete flame.
“I know enough about the different kinds of truth,” said I, working away at the bellows. “Haven’t I just been reading Professor Jacobus on ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’? What I want now is something concrete; and I wish you would try to give it to me, whatever perils it may involve. Tell me something about the books that you loved as a boy. Never mind your veracity, Uncle Peter, just be honest, that will be enough.”
“My veracity!” he grunted, “Humph! Impudent academic mocker, university life has destroyed your last rag of reverence. You have become a mere pivot for turning another fellow’s remarks against himself. However, if you will just allow me to talk, and promise to let those fire-irons alone, I will tell you about some of the literary loves of my boyhood.”
“I promise not to stir hand or tongue or foot,” said I, “unless I see you sliding towards a metaphysical precipice.”
“Very well,” said my Uncle Peter, “I will do my best to give you the facts. And the first is this: there never was a day in my boyhood when I would not rather go a-fishing than read the best book in the world. If the choice had been given me, I never would have hesitated between climbing a mountain or paddling a canoe, and spending hours in a library. I would have liked also to hunt grizzly bears and to fight Indians,–but these were purely Platonic passions, detached from physical experience. I never realized them in hot blood.
“My native preferences were trimmed and pruned by the fortune that fixed my abode, during nine months of every year, in the city of Brooklyn, where there were no mountains to climb, no rivers to canoe, and no bears to hunt. The winter of my discontent, however, was somewhat cheered by games of football and baseball in the vacant lots on the heights above Wall Street Ferry, and by fierce battles and single combats with the tribes of ‘Micks’ who inhabited the regions of Furman Street and Atlantic Avenue. There was no High Court of Arbitration to suggest a peaceful solution of the difficulties out of which these conflicts arose. In fact, so far as I can remember, there was seldom a casus belli which could be defined and discussed. The warfare simply effervesced, like gas from a mineral spring. It was chronic, geographical, temperamental, and its everlasting continuance was suggested in the threat with which the combatants usually parted: ‘wait till we ketch you alone, down our street!’
“There was also a school which claimed some hours of my attention on five days of the week. On holidays my father used to take me on the most delightful fishing excursions to the then unpolluted waters of Coney Island Creek and Sheepshead Bay; and on Monday afternoons in midwinter it was a regular thing that I should go with him to New York to ramble among the old book-shops in Nassau Street and eat oysters at Dorlon’s stall, with wooden tables and sawdust-sprinkled floor, in Fulton Market. Say what you please about the friendship of books: it was worth a thousand times more to have the friendship of such a father.