that you talked about, big things: books, music, science, politics, education, art. Never anything petty or humdrum. Even when you spoke of ordinary things, discussing them with the teacher made them seem extraordinary. Though the teacher’s subject was English, like your father, he knew a little about everything. For sure he knew much more than you did.
Again, you would not remember the details of your discussions. The details didn’t matter. What mattered were the quality of the exchanges themselves, the atmosphere of reverent silence imbued with the smoky smell of Chinese tea and the sounds of burning wood snapping in the stove, these along with the gestures and facial expressions of the teacher, which must have persuaded you as much or more than his ideas.
For weren’t you so engrossed by the teacher that you’d have been held spellbound by anything he said? Had he not become for you a sort of an oracle, a fount of wisdom, one so ornately beautiful you’d have drunk from its waters even knowing that they were bitter or polluted or poisoned? In the end, what he said mattered much less than his having said it. And what mattered even more was how, when not speaking, the teacher listened to you. It was his listening after all that held you in such thrall. To every word of his listening you clung for dear life.
And though your genius papa knew even more than the teacher did, the teacher was easier to talk to and with. He was much more tolerant of your ignorance.
Then there were the things that you didn’t talk about, the knowledge, wisdom, and insights that you absorbed from the teacher as if through osmosis while sitting or walking together in silence. Looking back, it would seem to you that you’d learned as much from those silences as from your talks. That two people could exist in a state of mutual contented silence was a revelation to you.
THANKS TO THE new teacher you developed the habit of reading. Before you hadn’t been that well read. In fact you hardly read at all. With their hundreds of pages tightly packed with words, books intimidated you. It seemed impossible if not absurd to you that anyone could read – let alone write – a whole book.
For being so intimidated by books you blamed your parents, who never read to you. Your mother couldn’t; her English wasn’t good enough. As for your father, he couldn’t be bothered. Anyway he disliked books in English, preferring those in other languages, especially German. They lined the shelves of the bookcase your father kept in the back room of the Building, the one with the trundle bed.
Thanks mainly to the foreign books on those shelves, you had come to think of all books as repositories of cunningly encrypted code, and concluded that they all, without exception, were incomprehensible.
This may explain why, seeing all those books jammed into the jerry-rigged shelves of the teacher’s cottage, you experienced something like what a small renegade republic must feel when confronted by the collective armies of an axis of powerful nations, their batteries loaded and trained upon your woeful ignorance. You couldn’t decide whether to surrender or run. Instead, you asked the teacher if you could borrow one of his books.
Help yourself, the teacher said. Only remember: when somebody lends you a book they’re letting you borrow a piece of their soul. Please be sure to return it.
You chose a slim paperback. With its yellow text on a lush green background – a splash of sunlight on moss – the cover appealed to you. The book’s opening paragraph struck a decidedly non-threatening note:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was this moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
THE WALLS OF the bedroom where you slept with your brother (twin brothers in twin twin beds) were painted chalky blue. On one wall was a painting your mother had done of a rabbit, on another a similar painting by her of a donkey. The curtains were a deeper blue than the walls, printed with steamship luggage tags and other tokens of travel to foreign destinations: Reno, Cannes, Lido, Waikiki, Amsterdam, St. Moritz, Paris.… Until you were ten years old, when your mother took you and your brother to Italy, those curtains did all of your traveling for you, stirred by the winds of the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs over the linen closet.
To the sound of the fan thrumming away through hot summer nights you conjured a mythical creature – part eagle, part lion, part dragon – living behind its folding louvers. The fan was controlled by a timer switch your father rigged up with a pulley for a dial, tucked under towels in the linen closet. That the switch was strictly off-limits didn’t stop you from tiptoeing to the linen closet in the middle of the night in your pajamas and giving the pulley a solid twist so the blue curtains would billow and the fan would thrum all night long, obscuring the rasps of crickets there to tell you how very hot and muggy it was.
That muggy September night, curled up in your bed with the lamp glowing and the blue curtains billowing and the ceiling fan thrumming, you read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or tried to. Within three pages your eyes went bleary. The paragraphs turned into rectangular swarms of gnats. Before long a raft like the Kon-Tiki arrived to float you and your illiterate dreams downstream to the Land of Nod.
Subsequent books met with similar results, with you asleep within three pages.
Over time, though, the word swarms flew in orderly fashion into your brain, which made sense out of them. Words formed sentences, sentences melded into meaning, and ideas, images, characters and events sprouted from the pages like vegetables in a garden. Thus the reader in you was born.
ONE OF THE books you borrowed from the teacher’s shelf was a novel by Hermann Hesse called Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game. Set in the twenty-fifth century, the story centers on an austere order of secular scholars who, while running a boarding school for boys, engage in a draconian intellectual game whose rules are deliberately obscure and whose devotees live in a segregated community in the province of Castalia known as Waldzell.
Joseph Knecht, the main character, is the order’s most distinguished member, the most accomplished player of the game. Convinced that Castalia has become an ivory tower cut off from the problems of those who live beyond its hermetic borders, Knecht resigns his post as Magister Ludi and renounces his cloistered existence to tutor a boy named Tito, the son of a friend. Days into his new vocation, while swimming with Tito, Knecht drowns in a mountain lake.
The name Castalia, you learned, comes from Greek mythology. It’s the name of the nymph Apollo transformed into the fountain at the base of Mount Parnassos at Delphi. According to the myth, anyone who drank from the fountain or listened to the music of its flowing waters would be transformed into a poet.
The teacher’s carriage house was your Castalia. The chessboard and its pieces were your Glass Bead Game. The teacher was Magister Ludi, Master of the Game. And you were Tito, his tutee, the dynamic and strong-willed boy.
WE DON’T SEE OURSELVES AS WE ARE BUT AS WE WERE or wish to be or as we fear becoming. The image in the mirror is a distortion – an amalgam of dreams, nightmares, nostalgia, fantasies, ideals, worries, and assumptions. Even photographs aren’t objective, since they offer only the thinnest slice of a moment in time, one assailed by shadows or harsh light, fleeting expressions and moods, colored in all sorts of ways first by the camera, then by the viewer – “a subjective and mood-filtered eye.”
There is no objectivity; or there is, but it’s an illusion.
I can’t tell you who I am, only who I think I am.
* * *
IN A DRAWER OF THE FILING CABINET IN MY LOFT there’s a cardboard portfolio jammed with photographs. One shows my twin brother
