The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ vision see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.’

      Middlemarch, Book 2, ‘Old and Young’

      There is a classic episode of the television comedy Hancock^fn1 called ‘The Bedsitter’, in which Tony Hancock, in a characteristically vain attempt at self-improvement, decides to ‘have a go’ at Bertrand Russell’s Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope.^fn2 Every few sentences – few words even – he has to put the book down and consult the large dictionary on his bedside table (‘Well, if that’s what they mean, why don’t they say so?’). Soon, frustration gets the better of him:

      fn1. Formerly Hancock’s Half Hour. The title changed in 1961 after the departure of Sid James.

      fn2. A knowing transposition? The correct title of Russell’s book is Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.

      ‘No, it’s him. It’s him that’s at fault, he’s a rotten writer. A good writer should be able to put down his thoughts clearly in the simplest terms understandable to everybody. It’s him. He’s a bad writer. Not going to waste my time reading him.’ (Drops Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope on the floor and picks up another book.) ‘Ah, that’s more like it – Lady Don’t Fall Backwards.’

      Fifty years later, a similar scene was being played out in our house. I lay on the bed with a nice new copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and tried to silence my inner Hancock.

      Eliot (from the ‘Prelude’): Who cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time …

      Hancock (from ‘The Bedsitter’): No, no, I should know. It’s in English, I should know what he’s talking about.^fn3

      fn3. George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. For minor comic effect, however, I have left Hancock’s words unaltered, thus giving you, the reader, the impression that he, Hancock, thinks George Eliot is a man. Ha ha! Sorry for these nit-picking footnotes, by the way, I know they disrupt the flow, but fans of George Eliot, Tony Hancock, Bertrand Russell et al. are an unforgiving lot and it is necessary to reassure them that what they are reading is unimpeachably correct, to the extent that I have compromised, even ruined, the opening of this chapter in order to secure their trust, solely to prevent the wholesale dismissal of a book it has taken me almost five years to write, simply because they, the so-called experts, might mistakenly assume that I don’t realise George Eliot was a woman. Of course George Eliot was a woman! But where experts are concerned, it goes without saying that nothing goes without saying.

      Eliot: Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women …

      Hancock: He’s a human being the same as me, using words, English words, available to us all. Now, concentrate.

      I succeeded in reading the ‘Prelude’ in its entirety. (‘Yes, it’s hard graft for we intellectuals these days.’) Then I read it again. It was only three paragraphs long, so I took a quick turn round the room, and then read it a third time. No, it was no good. I could hardly understand a word. But, unlike Hancock, I had no Lady Don’t Fall Backwards to fall back on. Middlemarch and I were going to have to get along.

      Of course, the problem was not Middlemarch. Despite my surprise conquest of The Master and Margarita, and the blast of confidence it gave me, I quickly knew I had overreached myself. The Master and Margarita had been an obstacle course; Middlemarch, on the other hand, gave every indication of being a 688-page punishment beating. Once upon a time, I had been in the habit of reading this kind of elaborate, circumlocutory prose. But that was when I was a student, full of piss and vinegar and blithe ignorance. Two decades on, I was gravely out of condition, short of breath, barely limping along. It was too much, too soon, too old.

      In those days, as an English literature undergraduate at a self-consciously progressive university, it was possible to read a couple of classics every week – unlikely, almost unheard of, but possible. In contrast, an audit of my current week’s reading would look something like this:

      200 emails (approx.)

      Discarded copies of Metro

      The NME and monthly music magazines

      Excel spreadsheets

      The review pages of Sunday newspapers

      Business proposals

      Bills, bank statements, junk mail, etc.

      CD liner notes

      Crosswords, Sudoku puzzles, etc.

      Ready-meal heating guidelines

      The occasional postcard

      And a lot of piddling about on the Internet

      Of these, the Sudoku was the most inexplicable to me. What a waste of time! I loathed it. Yet I could pass a whole train journey wrestling with one small grid, a long hour that brought me little or no pleasure, even on the rare occasions it ended in success. The shelves of WHSmith at Victoria station were packed with competing Oriental number tortures: Sudoku, Sun Doku, Code Doku, Killer Sudoku … As a former student acquaintance had written in the concluding sentence of a 10,000-word dissertation on mechanical engineering: ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all a load of shit.’^fn4

      fn4. Our university may have considered itself progressive but these eleven words earned him an F (for TELLING THE TRUTH).

      So, accepting I was in no fit state even to complete an Evening Standard ‘brainteaser’ – Grade: Beginner – why had I felt compelled to attempt Middlemarch, one of the high peaks of the English novel?

      As I approached my mid-thirties, before our son was born, while he was still a Nice Idea In The Not Too Distant Future, I started getting the first pangs of a feeling which soon grew acute. The feeling was this: one day soon, I am going to die. Previously, I had enjoyed brooding on my own mortality, because I was young and death was never going to happen to me. Now, however, like many people on the threshold of middle-age, out there in the jungle somewhere I could discern a disconcerting drumbeat; and I realised that at some point in the aforementioned Not Too Distant Future, closer now, the drumming would cease, leaving a terrible silence in its wake. And that would be it for me.

      Immediately, we produced a child. But if anything, this only made things worse.

      I had heard that other people dealt with this sort of problem by having ill-advised affairs with schoolgirls, or dyeing their hair a ‘fun’ colour, or plunging into a gruelling round of charity marathon running, ‘to put something back’. But I did not want to do any of that; I just wanted to be left alone. My sadness for things undone was smaller and duller, yet maybe more undignified. It seemed to fix itself on minor letdowns, everyday stuff I had been meaning to do but somehow, in half a lifetime, had not got round to. I was still unable to play the guitar. I had never been to New York. I did not know how to drive a car or roast a chicken. Roasting a chicken – the impossible dream! Even my mid-life crisis was a disappointment.

      I told myself I had a lot to be thankful for. I had a loving family, lived by the sea in a house which in thirty years I might СКАЧАТЬ