Tonight, another of Rohan Candappa’s left-field ideas. Choose one page from any book of your own choosing; explain your choice and read out that page.
I railed against the Desert Island Discs idea a few months ago…
…do I even need to explain that “choose just one page to read” meets a similarly febrile emotional push-back in my mind.
But I quite quickly settled on Hermann Hesse as my choice of author. George Elliot and Hermann Hesse are the only authors about whom I decided, on reading one novel, that I simply must try to read everything this person wrote.
Hesse’s novels are extraordinary and quite exceptional. I commend all of his novels to you. Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game are mind-blowing, but possibly not the place to start with Hesse’s work.
My first Hesse read was Demian. I picked up that novel, pretty much by chance, in a remaindered bookshop on the Charing Cross Road in the mid 1980s. Some of the fictional conversations in that book reminded me of conversations I’d enjoyed with Anil Biltoo, the school pal with whom I went to Mauritius in 1979 and through whom I met Fuzz, the subject of my first ThreadMash piece.
Hesse’s evident fascination with Eastern philosophies and my desire to read more about them took me next to Siddharta. There are two parts to the book; I am going to read you the few hundred words that conclude Part One; a point at which Siddharta reaches a spiritual awakening such that he is, in a sense, reborn in Part Two.
I don’t personally believe in reincarnation, but I did feel a shiver down my spine while researching this preamble, when I read Hermann Hesse’s Wikipedia entry. Hesse died on 9 August 1962. That was the day that Anil Biltoo was born.
The Events Of The Evening
I went first, so (apart from a short introduction by Rohan before I did my bit), this piece is sequenced in running order sequence.
Kay went next. She read The Owl-Critic by James Thomas Fields, reading from a charming anthology she has kept from primary school. Kay might chime in with the details of the anthology, but I’m guessing it is out of print and hard to find. She had peppered the poem with musical notation as a child, which was a charming additional detail.
Flo read Last Of the MetroZoids by Adam Gopnik. It is a very moving piece about the art historian, Kirk Varnedoe, coaching a boys football team while dying of cancer. It is a very moving piece, which Flo read beautifully.
Next up was Jan, who (Rohan suggested) wanted to style herself as Constance DeVereaux this evening…perhaps an in-joke between “spice”. Anyway, Jan read from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (another book available in the public domain through Project Gutenberg). She read the bit where Jo sacrifices her glorious head of hair to raise money for the family.
Ian Theodorson read a passage from East Of Eden by John Steinbeck (link is to Wikipedia entry, as the book is still in copyright). Ian preambled his reading by explaining some of the biblical references/allusions involved, not least the Cain & Abel story from the Old Testament.
Then a brief half-time discussion. The topic that got the most coverage was about Little Women and books of that kind, specifically whether there is an equivalent literary genre that helps young men to understand their romantic emotions. We concluded that there is seemingly no such genre.
We then had an actual half-time break, but there was no evidence of anyone eating cut up pieces of orange. Nor, mercifully, did Rohan try to motivate us with glib words and phrases such as “momentum”, “play as a unit”, “give it 120%” or “leave it all out there on the Zoom screen”.
There was then a euphemism-fest, using terms such as “recharging my gadget”, when it was clear that people wanted a toilet break.
I used that time as an opportunity to show those who remained my proud collection of decomposing Pooh.
Rohan kicked off the second half by reciting the lyric of What A Fool Believes by Michael McDonald & Kenny Loggins. There’s a bit of involuntary threading in there, as Kenny Loggins also famously produced Return To Pooh Corner, including Loggins song House At Pooh Corner. It’s a fabulous lyric which I looked at a year or two ago with a view to giving it the troubadour treatment; I might just about be able to sing it now.
John read a nerve-jangling passage from Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. It is a heart-stopping true story about a pair of mountaineers in the Andes who survived a disaster in almost-impossible circumstances. It was made into a much-lauded documentary film some years after the book came out.
Jill read a passage from The Book Of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith. She read the piece about amae, a Japanese emotion which is hard to translate into English. “It means something like the pleasure that you get when you’re able to temporarily hand over responsibility for your life to someone else”, to quote Tiffany herself from this rather fascinating interview with her about the book.
Adrian read an hilarious piece from March Of the Lemmings: Brexit In Print & Performance 2016-2019 by Stewart Lee. The passage Adrian read was a sequence of thank you letters to brexity aunts for their brexity Christmas presents. I learnt that we should all have an Anderson shelter for Brexit; who knew?
Terry read a passage from The Big Book: Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, explaining after his reading, in no uncertain terms, that this book saved his life.
Geraldine read us three Robert Frost poems. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but it has dawned on me the morning after, that The Road Not Taken, one of Frost’s best known and most debated poems, is a fascinating echo of the East Of Eden “free will” debate regarding the Cain & Abel story from Ian T’s reading. Geraldine read one other poem the title/detail of which has escaped me (she might chime in with the title), plus The Gift Outright, which Frost recited in person at John F Kennedy’s inauguration.
Perhaps they should book Stewart Lee to recite some fitting words for the outgoing president at Joe Biden’s inauguration, if the narcissist-in-chief bothers to show up.
After the event, a few of us stuck around for some further discussion, although it soon descended into weird debates about matters such as the relative merits of Michael Mcdonald & Malcolm MacDonald, two people who are surely very hard to distinguish from one another.
I have had this problem myself in my time. Who hasn’t?
Just one more parting thought, brought to mind by the thought of stories we loved as children and our parents’ influence. I am blessed to still have many recordings of my parents reading to me. I have several still to go through and upload to Ogblog, but one in particular, from when I was five, remains charming and is a complete story. I uploaded it a few years ago and several friends told me that they have played it many times over to their children. Hare And Guy Fawkes by Alison Uttley: