To think I paid only £2.50 for it. That’s an indication of how long I’ve had it. A Penguin edition, published in 1982. It’s one of the very few books that I want to have within reach, always. Not one I want to loan to anyone. How many copies I’ve bought for friends, just so my own can stay near to hand. Even to bring it to rehearsals gave me a minor twitch. How many evenings I’ve thumbed through this slim volume, stopping and staring at one or another of the photographs of people reading.
It could be the one of the man on the rungs of a ladder, so engrossed that he’s not bothered to come down. Or the two young men, propped up against a tree trunk, in a park on a summer’s day, casually absorbed. Five children on a bench, their knees crossed, open books on their laps and especially their hands and fingertips on the pages. A view through a window of a young woman making use of the daylight on a Rue Du Couedic; a view down onto a roof and another woman lying on a towel, she propped against a brick wall, her open book held by both her hands.
How ‘elsewhere’ they are; how held by whatever the written words are. And how still they sit. But of course if our eyes are not to lose focus of the letters, words and sentences, we must keep still. Yet in our minds, in our imaginations, we can go everywhere and anywhere. We can be frivolous; we can be serious. We can do anything; we can doubt everything.
These photographs allow me to reflect on how solitary and personal the activity of reading is. I suspect that is precisely why I like to look at them again and again.
Mary Ann Hushlak
Dramaturg, Reading with Bach
8 September 2013
It could be the one of the man on the rungs of a ladder, so engrossed that he’s not bothered to come down. Or the two young men, propped up against a tree trunk, in a park on a summer’s day, casually absorbed. Five children on a bench, their knees crossed, open books on their laps and especially their hands and fingertips on the pages. A view through a window of a young woman making use of the daylight on a Rue Du Couedic; a view down onto a roof and another woman lying on a towel, she propped against a brick wall, her open book held by both her hands.
How ‘elsewhere’ they are; how held by whatever the written words are. And how still they sit. But of course if our eyes are not to lose focus of the letters, words and sentences, we must keep still. Yet in our minds, in our imaginations, we can go everywhere and anywhere. We can be frivolous; we can be serious. We can do anything; we can doubt everything.
These photographs allow me to reflect on how solitary and personal the activity of reading is. I suspect that is precisely why I like to look at them again and again.
Mary Ann Hushlak
Dramaturg, Reading with Bach
8 September 2013
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