Annotation From The Back Page

Rereading the last section of David Corbett's The Mercy of the Night helped me to realize -- to remember -- the integrity of the reader and of independent / literary thought -- and how THAT was salvation, was refuge, whatever, in the chaos of my home life while growing up.

You have to --you get to -- you must -- figure it all out for yourself, like everyone else, and those absolutes set you free.

Reading properly sets you free. You have to earn it, but who expects freedom to come cheaply?

--Thoughts on finishing The Mercy of the Night -- 1/5/16

Reading Dickens: Reflection In Action

Today I started reading Dickens' David Copperfield for the second time in my life because of something novelist David Corbett shared in a speech at Marin's best bookstore Book Passage last week. I am realizing that I haven't read this novel in more than 30 years, not since undergraduate days.  I am enjoying the opening puzzle about "the hero of my own life" and the bit on "meandering" also on the first page, but then I encountered this paragraph on early memories, on the people who tend to have such strong powers of memory, and on the other qualities that such people tend to possess, and I found this passage resonant. I certainly have retained my "capacity of being pleased," which is no small thing, and I wish the capacity of being happy in life on all.

Here's the passage:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Ch. 2

Oddly enough, or not, I feel just a bit closer to the novelist and to his autobiographical narrator too.