I have almost always been surrounded by books. I wouldn't be surprised if my mother put some in the crib along with my toys, just to get me used to them early. The first house I remember living in was one of those double ones of which there are hundreds in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We lived in Germantown, in what was probably a cramped house (although to me as a child it seemed large) and there were books in the living room, books in the dining room, books in all of the bedrooms and tall bookcases lining the halls. My father came home at night with a briefcase full of papers and books.
Before I could read much myself I looked at picture books, like everybody else. I remember the lovely women and elegantly handsome men in Charles Dana Gibson's book of drawings. I went back again and again to an animal book which had a horrifyingly hideous photo of an angry gorilla with teeth bared. The beautiful little pictures in Beatrix Potter's books of neatly furred small animals gave me a delicious feeling of order and comfort. My mother read these aloud to me, and how eagerly I stooped with Lucie to enter Mrs. Tiggywinkle's laundry; or accompanied Simpkin the cat as he made his way through Gloucester's snowy lanes. Mr. MacGregor was a big, bad bogeyman to me. Mother read, too, the Christopher Robin stories, and I found myself identifying her with Kanga, my older brother Phil with Pooh, Dave with Piglet, and myself, alas but inescapably, with Eeyore.
Evenings at home were often spent with the whole family sitting together, each with his head in a book. Or at times my father would read aloud. He bored us to death reading passages from Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or George Borrow. The Bible in Spain was ''good writing," he said, and he wanted us to hear it. He loved good writing, and as an editor had to read an awful lot of appallingly bad writing, but I am grateful now for his efforts to teach us the difference. He also read sometimes to us from Henry A. Shute's Real Diary of a Real Boy, which got the closest thing to a belly laugh I ever heard out of my sedate father.
A big dictionary was always within reach of the dining room table because it was there that arguments most frequently arose over words. He wanted them quickly settled, and made us look up the words in question.
A part of each summer was spent at ''The Cottage," a big old lodge-type house in the White Mountains built by my great-great uncle, who was, among other things, editor of the New York Journal of Commerce and a writer of books. His bedroom on the second floor, an enormous paneled one with a huge fireplace, had hardly been rearranged at all since he died, and one wall was still lined with crumbling leather-bound books. A rainy day in the mountains was a chance for me to pore over field manuals from the Civil War, great volumes on law, Mrs. Oliphant's novels, or a tiny set, tinily printed, of the unabridged Arabian Nights.
There were magazines on the bottom shelves, too--old ones, with advertisements of Pear's soap or Glen kitchen ranges, and I found in them serialized stories by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The first full-length book I recall reading was not a piece of great literature, but it had a great effect on my malleable mind. It was called Hell on Ice, the saga of sixty men who attempted to reach the North Pole by way of the Bering Strait. Only a few survived, and I agonized with them as they froze and starved on the icy wastes. I was carried out of myself and my pleasant porch hammock into danger, suffering, and death. I became aware of vulnerability, mortality, and human courage.
To my detriment I managed to go through four years of high school without reading more than two or three classics. I had a good freshman English teacher who made me see vividly the world of chivalry and heraldry through Ivanhoe, so that I still love to visit the medieval halls of museums. In my junior or senior year I very hastily skimmed David Copperfield in order to write a book report. I may have read one or two others which I have entirely forgotten, but literature was merely a requirement. No other teacher made me understand what it was all about. (B. F. Westcott said, "It is the office of art to reveal the meaning of that which is the object of sense.")
But of course there was the Bible, in a class all by itself. This was The Book in our home, and we heard it read every day, usually twice a day. The King James English was as simple and familiar to me, with all its "beholds" and "it came to passes," as Philadelphia talk (pronounced twawk). The resonance of the Books of Moses, the cadences of the Psalms, the lucidity of the Gospel of John, the soaring rhapsodies of Paul on the love of God, the strange figures of the Book of the Revelation, all sank deeply into my heart and mind. Everything in life, I believed, had meaning as it related to what I knew of The Book.
There were many books in our home by and about people who lived by the Bible. It was in Amy Carmichael, a missionary to South India, that I found the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was at work for the Lord (an Anglican, she had founded a place for saving little girls from temple prostitution), and she took time in the midst of this to write of her experience as she walked by faith in a place where almost no one shared that faith.
A friend gave me The Imitation of Christ when I was in college, and I read it slowly, finishing it the following summer during evenings in a university stadium where I climbed up to watch the sunset.
One year when I was tutoring I came across, in the library of my pupils, a dull-looking novel called Salted With Fire. I had never heard of George MacDonald, but his writing gave me a whole new vista of the love of God. There was a shining quality to it, and a deep humanity. C. S. Lewis, I later learned, had found it, too, and did an anthology of MacDonald's work.
The biographies of missionaries--Hudson Taylor of China, James Fraser of Lisuland, David Brainerd of early New Jersey, Raymond Lull of North Africa--influenced the course of my life. Sometimes, if we can catch the sound of music that other people march to, we can fall into step.
It was when I lived in the jungle that books were hard to keep. Mold, mildew, crickets, and smoke did their worst, and I did not always have a way to transport more than one or two books at a time, or a place to keep them other than an Indian carrying net hung under the thatch. But they became even more precious, more indispensable in times when I had little contact with English-speaking people. I got around to reading some great books then--Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Each spoke to me in some powerful, personal way.
Kafka said that books should serve as "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Tolstoy showed me my own vulnerability and need of redemption--as Flannery O'Connor does, too, in her "stories about original sin," as she describes them. De Chardin illuminated for me the immanence of God. Dinesen reveals majesty and dignity in human beings and animals as creatures of God, and the laughter at the heart of things. (In one book, Seven Gothic Tales, she touches the courage of the Creator, the power of women, a herd of unicorns, the reason for seasons, the dogs of God, angels and chamber pots, coffee and the word of the Lord, and Mary Magdalene on Good Friday Eve. Imagine the humor and courage it takes to put all that in seven stories!)
A reader understands what he reads in terms of what he is. As a Christian reader I bring to bear on the book I am reading the light of my faith. "All things are yours, for ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's," said Paul. Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi expresses it this way:
. . . This world's no blot for us, nor blank;
It means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
Author:Elisabeth Elliot
Before I could read much myself I looked at picture books, like everybody else. I remember the lovely women and elegantly handsome men in Charles Dana Gibson's book of drawings. I went back again and again to an animal book which had a horrifyingly hideous photo of an angry gorilla with teeth bared. The beautiful little pictures in Beatrix Potter's books of neatly furred small animals gave me a delicious feeling of order and comfort. My mother read these aloud to me, and how eagerly I stooped with Lucie to enter Mrs. Tiggywinkle's laundry; or accompanied Simpkin the cat as he made his way through Gloucester's snowy lanes. Mr. MacGregor was a big, bad bogeyman to me. Mother read, too, the Christopher Robin stories, and I found myself identifying her with Kanga, my older brother Phil with Pooh, Dave with Piglet, and myself, alas but inescapably, with Eeyore.
Evenings at home were often spent with the whole family sitting together, each with his head in a book. Or at times my father would read aloud. He bored us to death reading passages from Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or George Borrow. The Bible in Spain was ''good writing," he said, and he wanted us to hear it. He loved good writing, and as an editor had to read an awful lot of appallingly bad writing, but I am grateful now for his efforts to teach us the difference. He also read sometimes to us from Henry A. Shute's Real Diary of a Real Boy, which got the closest thing to a belly laugh I ever heard out of my sedate father.
A big dictionary was always within reach of the dining room table because it was there that arguments most frequently arose over words. He wanted them quickly settled, and made us look up the words in question.
A part of each summer was spent at ''The Cottage," a big old lodge-type house in the White Mountains built by my great-great uncle, who was, among other things, editor of the New York Journal of Commerce and a writer of books. His bedroom on the second floor, an enormous paneled one with a huge fireplace, had hardly been rearranged at all since he died, and one wall was still lined with crumbling leather-bound books. A rainy day in the mountains was a chance for me to pore over field manuals from the Civil War, great volumes on law, Mrs. Oliphant's novels, or a tiny set, tinily printed, of the unabridged Arabian Nights.
There were magazines on the bottom shelves, too--old ones, with advertisements of Pear's soap or Glen kitchen ranges, and I found in them serialized stories by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The first full-length book I recall reading was not a piece of great literature, but it had a great effect on my malleable mind. It was called Hell on Ice, the saga of sixty men who attempted to reach the North Pole by way of the Bering Strait. Only a few survived, and I agonized with them as they froze and starved on the icy wastes. I was carried out of myself and my pleasant porch hammock into danger, suffering, and death. I became aware of vulnerability, mortality, and human courage.
To my detriment I managed to go through four years of high school without reading more than two or three classics. I had a good freshman English teacher who made me see vividly the world of chivalry and heraldry through Ivanhoe, so that I still love to visit the medieval halls of museums. In my junior or senior year I very hastily skimmed David Copperfield in order to write a book report. I may have read one or two others which I have entirely forgotten, but literature was merely a requirement. No other teacher made me understand what it was all about. (B. F. Westcott said, "It is the office of art to reveal the meaning of that which is the object of sense.")
But of course there was the Bible, in a class all by itself. This was The Book in our home, and we heard it read every day, usually twice a day. The King James English was as simple and familiar to me, with all its "beholds" and "it came to passes," as Philadelphia talk (pronounced twawk). The resonance of the Books of Moses, the cadences of the Psalms, the lucidity of the Gospel of John, the soaring rhapsodies of Paul on the love of God, the strange figures of the Book of the Revelation, all sank deeply into my heart and mind. Everything in life, I believed, had meaning as it related to what I knew of The Book.
There were many books in our home by and about people who lived by the Bible. It was in Amy Carmichael, a missionary to South India, that I found the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was at work for the Lord (an Anglican, she had founded a place for saving little girls from temple prostitution), and she took time in the midst of this to write of her experience as she walked by faith in a place where almost no one shared that faith.
A friend gave me The Imitation of Christ when I was in college, and I read it slowly, finishing it the following summer during evenings in a university stadium where I climbed up to watch the sunset.
One year when I was tutoring I came across, in the library of my pupils, a dull-looking novel called Salted With Fire. I had never heard of George MacDonald, but his writing gave me a whole new vista of the love of God. There was a shining quality to it, and a deep humanity. C. S. Lewis, I later learned, had found it, too, and did an anthology of MacDonald's work.
The biographies of missionaries--Hudson Taylor of China, James Fraser of Lisuland, David Brainerd of early New Jersey, Raymond Lull of North Africa--influenced the course of my life. Sometimes, if we can catch the sound of music that other people march to, we can fall into step.
It was when I lived in the jungle that books were hard to keep. Mold, mildew, crickets, and smoke did their worst, and I did not always have a way to transport more than one or two books at a time, or a place to keep them other than an Indian carrying net hung under the thatch. But they became even more precious, more indispensable in times when I had little contact with English-speaking people. I got around to reading some great books then--Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Each spoke to me in some powerful, personal way.
Kafka said that books should serve as "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Tolstoy showed me my own vulnerability and need of redemption--as Flannery O'Connor does, too, in her "stories about original sin," as she describes them. De Chardin illuminated for me the immanence of God. Dinesen reveals majesty and dignity in human beings and animals as creatures of God, and the laughter at the heart of things. (In one book, Seven Gothic Tales, she touches the courage of the Creator, the power of women, a herd of unicorns, the reason for seasons, the dogs of God, angels and chamber pots, coffee and the word of the Lord, and Mary Magdalene on Good Friday Eve. Imagine the humor and courage it takes to put all that in seven stories!)
A reader understands what he reads in terms of what he is. As a Christian reader I bring to bear on the book I am reading the light of my faith. "All things are yours, for ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's," said Paul. Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi expresses it this way:
. . . This world's no blot for us, nor blank;
It means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
Author:Elisabeth Elliot
