Mother always warned me about the book-fairies. I held them in greater awe than even the Christian God during the two brief phases in my life when I did live in fear of Him, first at the innocent age of five when I had my tonsils and adenoids out and was discovered to be seriously myopic. Then, less innocently, after I stumbled upon masturbation and became persuaded that each instance of the strange and compulsive spasms it occasioned was cause for dire punishment, perhaps the gruesome deaths of my parents when they were out and I was baby-sitting the younger siblings, or something yet worse for which I would be responsible.
The book-fairies were aligned on the side of illicit pleasure, on books and reading, my first solitary vice, one in which I sought refuge well before the adolescent surge of hormones enabled a second private gratification. But the book-fairies could wreak Furies-like vengeance on whoever might unwisely harm books.
Dogging of ears, writing in ink, defacing or stressing in any other way the pages or the binding of a book were all infractions beyond appeal. Librarians, past whom it was possible to slip inadvertently damaged volumes, were a comparatively forgiving bunch, and in any case not privy to the immediate scenes of crime, as were the book-fairies who constantly spied through my own eyes to catch the slightest transgression.
It might be possible to construe this inner censorship as quintessentially Protestant, though the brand of Protestants I knew then were hardly bookish — barely literate, actually.
It now also seems to me that after suffering the two aforementioned bouts of monotheism, like childhood measles and mumps, I drifted towards the practice of polymorphous animism, accepting that some daemons, not all of whom are benign, lodge within, and that I am beholden to all which are properly mine. This is perhaps why I found the Shinto underlying Aikido even more appealing than its Zen component.
Admittedly, I did not discover reading on my lonesome. I was taught to read at four by Granny, Mother’s mother, a southern iron maiden who was driven by spirits of her own, among them the urge to transmit something of her gumption to the sickly and introspective child I was, or at the very least to keep my shirt tail tucked in. She had been a school marm before marrying in the 20s. Then, after my grandfather’s accidental death by street-car in the Houston Heights (average elevation 92 feet), she eked out the Depression as a widowed secretary on refinery row in the East End.
Perhaps it is a false memory, but I recall the process of learning to read as having been virtually instantaneous, of a piece. There are after all only twenty-six letters and, despite slander to the contrary, they more or less capture the sounds of English, though there is the problem of their orientation, pointing left as opposed to right, and their order, easily permutated and transposed. My dyslexia was mild, but affects me to this day.
In any event, the words to be found in books were vastly more numerous than those I had encountered in daily life before, and for many years. So from early on I had a large reading vocabulary to which I would resort by default, chronically mispronouncing words, having read them long before I heard them.
As for the book-fairies, to this day I inscribe marginal notes only sparingly in soft pencil, promising myself to return eventually with an art gum eraser, a product whose aroma I relish.
The internet will likely soon arrive, on the way to its destined dystopian perfection, to the stage where we can attach not only images and sounds but also smells to a webpage, at this very site, for example, projecting at you the reader in a subliminal molecular burst an olfactory simulacrum of crumbled art gum, no doubt the preferred votive offering of the lares which watch over books. But I suspect that most readers do not need that trigger, that ersatz madeleine. Words, maybe even a static image like that above, being up to the job.
[Revised version; originally published in The Devil’s Workshop on Bloomsday, June 16, 2010, not, alas, on Proust’s birthday]