. Spinning .

Despite the slight drizzle this morning after a decent rain, I am out in the garden doing a bit of weeding.  Of what I’ve already read on my computer travels this morning, something strikes me as I go down the rows haunched over the herbs.  The below is from Steve Ersinghaus’ latest entry on the Reading the Tea Leaves series:

"1. All people are readers in the broad sense. The gardener reads the garden; the traveler reads the landscape; and the engineer reads the particular system.
2. In the professions, people maintain various reading competencies given their relevant knowledge contexts."

As I weed, I am thinking about how I am reading the soil, the dill, the crabgrass.  All the years of gardening have taught me to recognize most weeds and vegetables from the time they are only about an eighth of an inch high.  I know that weeds sprout and grow faster than most desirable plants, and can soon overtake the especially slow-growing herbs.  I used to use a trick in sowing rows, tossing in a few radish seeds along with the rest because they come up quickly and will mark the rows easily before the rest come up.  It works, but this tool was interfering with the slower basil; radish grow so quickly that they push everything out of the way, and by the time you pull them, you are as well destroying the basil.  The tool then becomes a blockage to good growth, it is in the way. 

I have developed my sense of recognition of the "good stuff" to the point of seeing the tiny glossy leaves of basil, the two long thin starting leaves of cilantro, the feathers of dill, just as they are emerging from the ground. 

I am becoming a more discriminating and alert reader of the garden through experience and storage of the information I have learned.

What makes something a classic?  Or a best-seller?  Two very different answers, I am sure.  Quite possibly the only thing they have in common is that eventually, a classic becomes a best seller but it takes decades, sometimes centuries longer. 

But what is it about a book that makes it endure?  What holds the interest of a diverse and ever-changing society?  And this makes me curious, who are the first people that recognize the value besides the author himself?  Is it a case of good ideas, good writing, and what is the interpretation of "good" anyway? 

As far as best sellers go, unless it becomes a phenomena that holds a place in history because of a particular gimmick or completely new concept or presentation, most will slowly fade from shelves in time. 

I look at something like "Candide" and while it obviously has historical value as a satirical view of its time, and in its very nature of having to thinly veil fact in a fiction format, it is a classic as well because it is good reading.  It is as entertaining as a masterpiece of satire, although the understanding  of the satire is no longer of the passionate urgency nor immediate relevance and danger as it was in its time. 

Why do we want to read a book that was written a century ago, are willing to adjust ourselves to an outdated use of language, and how does it become familiar in the reading so that the barrier is easily overcome and we are just readers, not readers from the future that a writer could not possibly have conceived of as his audience.

Just thinkin’. 

Cannot still his voice when thinking pilgrim.  A traveler, "somebody who is making a journey of any kind" (Encarta).  I am, I am.

But I also feel a "religious traveler, somebody who goes on a journey to a holy place for religious reasons" (Encarta) for I believe that knowledge offered within the words is a high and holy sacristy and my wants are indeed religious in their intent of better understanding. 

Long ago I unwrapped a chocolate rabbit, then read the little illustrated storybook inside the box.  I was in my twenties, as were the friends I read it to aloud.  I changed not a word, but merely by tone, inflection and pause, turned the story into an x-rated version that would not be suitable for any child.  I used my knowledge of duality of meaning, the art of innuendo, to raise the level of the story to something else entirely that both I and my friends understood, and laughed hysterically about.

Enjoyment in reading.  Experience in comprehension.  Understanding nuance.  A different story emerged.

(Please do follow the discussion on The Great Lettuce Head’s Series on Reading.  It has become as important to me right now as writing, and seems inextricably linked.)