Basic Reading: Sunday Penance

 

Torture Stake, Not a Cross

I hesitated a long while whether to include this part in Basic Reading, mostly because it wasn’t really reading in any sort of creative sense, and it was never meant to be. It was meant to be a mind-numbing, soul-crushing, bland food to be crammed down and spewed forth again by rote. For seven long years we were isolated from participating in anything social, political, cultural or historical, except for anything pertaining to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it made us odd. I don’t really want to blame Mom, although she was responsible for it (Pop certainly didn’t care about it but went along with things to be peaceful); she was just as duped as anyone and got out as soon as she realized a few things.

By a peculiar sort of paradox, we were encouraged to be as intelligent and as well-mannered as we could be, to prove how superior our way of life was to ‘the outside world.’ We were just forbidden to use that intelligence for anything but the propagation of the Ministry. ‘Art’, both literary and graphic, was discouraged, except for the simple, sanitized, bland offerings served up by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Among the children of the Kingdom Hall, there could be no other allowed subject of enthusiastic conversation, no cartoons, no TV shows, no music, no movies. That was all ‘worldly.’ Not that such things weren’t indulged in on the sly. You couldn’t help it.

Well. These days I try not to dwell on that period too much, to give it too much oxygen, as it were. It is too bitter. No birthdays, no holidays, no friends (‘worldly associates’), all cut out of the deepest heart of my childhood. I think that was the one aspect of the business that Pop appreciated: not having to buy presents for his swarming brood on any regular basis.

But out of such arid fare as the Kingdom Hall (not a Church; those were corrupt!) offered us, we still tried to squeeze some imaginative or even spiritual nourishment.  ‘Reading’ included all the candy-colored Watch Tower Society ‘study books’ we were expected to buy, and it was a bonus if they had any illustrations.

Off we would go every Sunday, each boy armed with a purple song book (not a hymnal!) and a bright green translation of the Scriptures (not a Bible, but a New World Translation of the Holy Scripture!), the famous ‘Green Ghost’ produced by no known translators or scholars but strictly vetted to adhere to JW doctrine. On the inside cover they did have a world map, showing the lands and peoples of the ancient world, including a friendly little dinosaur wandering the sandy wastes of Africa. What were we to make of that?

We did get some mileage poring over the map, the only ‘illustration’ allowed in the book. Perhaps my fascination with maps in other Fantasy books even stems from the JW version of their ‘Bible’.

But for reading (not at the Kingdom Hall, of course, that was given over to ‘talks’ and ‘studies’) we kids had the Paradise book (From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained), a large, profusely illustrated volume following the retelling of ‘salvation history’ from the JW slant, for children. That was better, in a way, because it included fantastical drawings (wizards! dragons! miracles! slaughter! torture!) as did the magazines The Watchtower and Awake! These regularly featured sinners getting theirs (just getting killed, of course, Hell didn’t exist) and the saved enjoying a romp in Paradisal Earth. Fear, not love, was a big part of indoctrination. There was certainly no comfort.

Well. Like I said, I should leave it be; I’ve already gone on too long about it. It happened, and it can’t ‘unhappen’, although it was certainly unhappy. It still lurks in the dark corners of my memory, but at least it has been washed out of my spirit. I’m just glad it did not sour me on God.

C. S. Lewis on "Basic Reading" and Why

 

"They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth; if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings; a train doesn't grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next."

--from "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," (1952).

 

"I spent the afternoon and evening...beginning to re-read The Well at The World's End. I was anxious to see whether the old spell still worked. It does--rather too well. This going back to books read at that age is humiliating: one keeps on tracing what are now quite big thing's in one's mental outfit to curiously small sources. I wonder how much even of my feeling for external nature comes out of the brief, convincing little descriptions of mountains and woods in this book." ---C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me.

 

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

Basic Reading: The Breisemeister Bump

 

Basic reading. A memory collection of books, comics, and magazines I read from elementary (McQueeney) through middle school (Briesemeister). Ranging from very simple to what I would describe as ‘cusp books’, that would lead to more adult reading. They will come in batches; some are representative parts of series. Some we had; some we saw in libraries. Most have appeared on the blog before, but I think arranged here by category and time they can be more illuminating of certain aspects of my childhood.

And then there came the Briesemeister Bump (straddling the end of 1974 and the beginning of 1977). So much Mythology, Lore, and Fantasy discovered; so much of my path set. I was out of the gregarious little social pond of grade school and swimming almost anonymously in a slightly bigger social pond, finding my own way of reading and branching out from the narrow stream of reading that grade school dictated.

I dipped into but did not actually read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m vaguely surprised that I read The Wind in the Willows but did not read Alice in Wonderland. I read The Sword in the Stone waiting for class to start in Mr. Fleming’s room. I was reading The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in the parking lot during football practice when Billy Castleberry tried to make me leave the car. I shared the runes from The Hobbit with my friend Steve Jones. The Dark is Rising, The Crystal Cave, An Enemy at Green Knowe, The Wizard in the Tree, A Wizard of Earthsea, all led to me following their series and authors, some for years. Beowulf the Warrior and The Children of Odin took me into the stark legends of the North, where before had been stories from Greece.

And, of course, this was mainly the time that I read The Hobbit, and The Tolkien Reader, and Mike brought me The Lord of the Rings trilogy from high school. That is a journey that is still going, ever on and on. And it was the beginning of my own individuated road and heralded the end of Basic Reading. 

Basic Reading: Home Brew

 

Basic reading. A memory collection of books, comics, and magazines I read from elementary (McQueeney) through middle school (Briesemeister). Ranging from very simple to what I would describe as ‘cusp books’, that would lead to more adult reading. They will come in batches; some are representative parts of series. Some we had; some we saw in libraries. Most have appeared on the blog before, but I think arranged here by category and time they can be more illuminating of certain aspects of my childhood.

I’m calling this batch of books Home Brew because most of them were more popular culture than anything originating in school or library reading. We had that Grimm’s Fairy Tales beyond kid memory, and its weird imagery and odd tales (no three bears or red riding hood here!) was a big ingredient in the Brew. The Secret of Crossbone Hill (a summer camping read) was bought at the same place that we got Planet of the Apes, I think, a little ‘army surplus store’ if my memory is correct. That book in profile is Reader’s Digest’s Stories for Young Readers, a great book I perused at Aunt Melva and Uncle Monroe’s house. Pop brought home that black edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the dump. King Arthur, Jaws, and vampires were all subjects of special interest through the Briesemeister years as we set out feelers into the broader culture.