Time Enough At Last

There is a classic Twilight Zone episode called "Time Enough At Last." It's about a quiet, bespectacled man who loves to read. He sneaks off at every opportunity to read - only to be interrupted by people, work, and so on. He is reading in a vault where he works when a nuclear attack takes place and wipes out everyone else. He escapes the vault, sees the devastation, searches for people, realizes he is totally alone, and is about to give in to despair, when he discovers the library, with all the books waiting for him. He happily makes piles of books, planning the years of reading ahead. He has time enough at last. And then ... there is a typical Twilight Zone twist. His glasses get broken, so he can't read.

I always loved that episode. I understood that man. I identified with him.

I've been reading as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, I read anything I could get my hands on. Books. Magazines. Cereal Boxes. I even used to grab volumes of our family encyclopedia and skim through them. When my mother went shopping, she would leave me at the comic book and magazine rack and go off to get whatever she needed, knowing that when she came back an hour later I would be there, reading (a safer time when a parent could do that!).

It may be a terrible thing to admit, but even as a child, the introvert in me preferred the company of books to being with people.

As a teacher, I read constantly, but a lot of what I read was related to what I was teaching, or thinking of teaching. Good books. Many classics. But they were works I felt I had to read. I always had books I was reading for myself, but they took me a long time. I wanted time enough to just read them.

During the coronavirus shutdown, I was distant teaching for three months - spending hours each day on the computer with students. A terrible way to teach, and a strain on the eyes. But in between, I did manage to finish a couple of books. The first was The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. I did want to read it, but it was a book I was reading with my students, so it was not completely freely chosen. Then I read a book I'd thought of doing with them: Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly.

But the school year ended, and I retired. No more grading. No more lesson planning. No more reading works I was teaching. Since then, I've read:

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang
Silent Night: The Story of The World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub
Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir by Jim Forest
1984 by George Orwell (this one was a reread)

Interesting. Some are clearly inspired by what's going on in the world right - so many echoes of the Cultural Revolution and tyranny affecting language and social behavior. Some are in tune with my love of history. The Forest one is because of my Catholic Worker and peace sympathies. The sonnets were because of my poetic inclinations. And Shakespeare - well, he's Shakespeare!

I have now started  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, a book I've wanted to read for a long time.

After that, Hmmm. I have time enough at last.

I just hope I don't break my glasses.

Pax et bonum