Essays in Idleness

Like many another, my introduction to the “intellectual” life came with the purchase of a “beuk.” It was not my introduction to reading, per se, for I had learnt all about this, almost involuntarily, at the age of three. (I can date this because it was when my sister was born, my mama almost “doyed,” and I was left for several weeks in the charge of a babysitter whom I despised, and a Pookie beuk. My attempts to read it began, positively, from my typographical delight with the letter “g,” which resembled a pair of spectacles hung vertically from their side. Negatively, it began with my clever tactic, to escape the attention of this nanny, by concealing myself behind this beuk, which had large pages. I had the other twenty-five letters down in no time. Soon I discovered that reading was a means to be left alone, by everybody.

I had years of reading “for pleasure,” which led from Pookie through Kipling to other story-tellers, and I was able to avoid what was given me to read, for “education.” But I was not reading, nor thinking, philosophically.

This I attribute to Mr Huntington Cairns, and Miss Edith Hamilton, and the others who assembled the edition of Plato, in English, for the Bollingen Foundation. It was a thick, wide book (the text is 25 picas), with nearly 1,800 pages of thin paper, whose physical design commanded, “Care for me.”

All of my knowledge of things, or more precisely, of what I know I don’t know, began there and continued in beuks — to Aristotle, quite naturally, and then to Aristotle’s brilliant exponent, Thomas Aquinas, and thus from paganism to the Catholic religion. But all of this was continued at leisure, which is to say, it took a long time. I was twenty-two before I discovered Christ, the real person, or rather He discovered me. But all of this began, I think, with Plato and typography.

The recovery of the West may proceed in the same way — aesthetically, and then philosophically — and then, eventually, we may find that we have been rediscovered, by Christ. Deus vult!

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — You see, this was the first of many gifts from my wee little sister. By dawdling in the maternity ward, and delaying my mama, she made it possible for me to learn the alphabet; and this would prove (on balance) useful in later life. Though as you may have noticed, passim, I do not think literacy an unambiguous blessing.