After Buck and I saw Sideways this afternoon (great, loved it etc.), we stopped off at the bookstore at the mall before heading home… Barnes & Noble. They have their own line of classics that they put out (smart — don’t have to pay anyone for the rights, or remember to send out royalty checks), and I love to go through the tables of them.
Like I said in Norm’s interview, I have a long list of books I’m reading. In deference to that stack of paper, I didn’t buy any of the classics arrayed before me. I loved the stories — Poe, Walden, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Three Musketeers. But was it the stories I really wanted? It had never occurred to me to ask that before.
And the answer was no. What I think of when I think of The Three Musketeers, for instance, isn’t the story itself, it’s what I was and where I was when I first read it that one summer so long ago, most of it spent at camp in the northern part of Michigan (not the U.P. — at about the tip of the ring finger of the mitten).
What I think of is laying on my bunk at night reading, and then, after lights out, lying there on top of the covers thinking about the story, and everything else in the world, until I went to sleep, to wake up freezing around midnight, and everything even darker than before. And waking up early, seeing the first sunlight at the top tips of the birches.
So that’s inextricably intwined in the story of The Three Musketeers for me. Do I want the story in the book, or my memories of reading it? Both.
white pebble 