There are many elements of my childhood that I find it almost impossible to abandon. Some of them I even enjoy - reading aloud, or being read to is definitely at the top of the list.
Winter evenings my father read to us from Tom Sawyer and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (in the living room by the fireplace as we sat on the floor in our pajamas with the dog and our stuffed animals (you may now gag, but remember - this is my reality)) (also, hot cocoa). In the third grade, our teacher read Caddie Woodlawn to us, and my young adulthood holds afternoons spent with friends and The Phantom Tollbooth and The Princess Bride floating around in words that landed on the walls and the chairs and our hearts more real than laughter.
I loved La Lectrice (The Reader) almost instantly because of the whimsical nature of the serious business of reading aloud from the page to someone else in the room. Also, it's just funny. (aside: I saw a lot of really good movies one spring. Just a thought.)
Knitting and crochet and macrame and all of those crafts that end in -ay or something like it are enjoyable and productive and creative and kind of quiet. I am not so enamoured of my own voice that I have to be surrounded by it at all times, but I do like the sound of someone's voice. Music is almost too intense to hear while creating, but learning or landscape or mystery or magic, these are welcome to my home - not through earbuds, but played out to fill the space.
O Jerusalem turned the futon on which I knitted my poncho into a goat-skin tent with cups of gritty coffee and air thick with stories so layered no one knows where one tradition could even begin to begin.
Inkspell is sheer ear candy. The story is dark and difficult and weighty with storytelling matters and yarn turns to lace very easily to Brendan Fraser's voice.
I'd been reading the Lectures volume of the Harvard Classics out loud in the house in Maryville. The cats were not so fond of it, but I liked the exercise of speaking well turned sentences and different rhythms. My writing got better and my voice started finding more creative ways of interpreting the words on the page. I miss it.
It is a very grounding experience, something that cannot be pretended
away: the sound of a voice, a human voice, making human sounds out of
humanly created letters and words and sentences. It is always around a
fire/kitchen table/hearth.There is a magic to the noises made, to the act of making them - I am not alone when I am reading out loud the words of someone I will never meet.
I am excited to try to participate in the BYOB events at Subterranean Books once I get to St. Louis. I loved the day long reading of Paradise Lost at UNL to commemorate Milton's 400th birthday. One of these days, I will find the time and resources to read for Librivox. The last time I checked, there were still very many titles in the public domain without recordings in the archive.
We read silently. We read publicly. We read dispassionately. There is difficulty reading aloud, it is a thing to be practiced. Fortunately, even though the cats don't like hearing me read aloud, I can always scratch that up to a deficiency in feline nature. :)
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