November 6, 2004
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A Pleasant Shock of Recognition
Everybody’s been talking about how they suddenly feel out-of-sync with their fellow Americans, so let me tell you a story about just the opposite:
I was fiddling with my Friendster profile just now and couldn’t figure out what to put in the always-challenging “About Me” section. So I thought: Hmm, maybe I should reference some formative experience. A book that made an early impression on me, perhaps?
And as soon as I had that thought, my course was clear. Here’s what I wrote:
Back in elementary school, we had that day when we’d troop over to the little elementary school library, right? And everybody would check out a book.Well, I got the same one EVERY WEEK: “D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths.” (I just double-checked the name on Amazon. Still in print!)
Bump Corduroy; I was all about Poseidon. By grade four I knew Hades from Ares and Artemis from Athena.
Mars, Jupiter, Pluto? PLEASE. I had no truck with that rip-off Roman crap.
I swear I faded the colors on those pages (and it was a really cool, beautiful book, too) with my unrelenting ten-year-old gaze. There was nothing more fascinating.
And thus I was gifted for the rest of my years with a preternatural command of Hellenic cosmology.
And in the “Describe Who You Want To Meet” box I wrote, in classic I-can’t-actually-take-this-seriously Friendster style:
Whichever other kid always wanted to check that book out but couldn’t ‘cause I always had it. I’d like to apologize.
So here’s the thing: I really did look “D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths” up on Amazon. And after I submitted my profile (which will no doubt be re-written in approximately seventy-five minutes), I went back and read the customer reviews. And holy crap:
“When I was around eleven years old, I checked this book out of the library so many times the other patrons never had a chance! From that time forward, the stories I read in this book have been at the core of my psyche.”“I read this book so many times when I was child that it managed to burrow itself into my consciousness and left many images burned into my head…”
“The gorgeous illustrations are still burned in my memory.”
“I found this book in the library when I was 8 and fell in love with the beautiful art work, the wonderful retelling of the stories and the overall way the book is designed. I checked it out of the library so often that the school librarian eventually gave it to me.”
There are lots more. What strikes me is not the uniformity of praise but the similarity of experience: These people did exactly what I did! We all checked out this book, this wonderful tome, again and again, never able to get enough of the stories and the pictures.
I know it kids obsess over books all the time. But it was just such a pleasing moment: to be browsing Amazon and see strangers so accurately describing an experience I didn’t know we shared.
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Comments
Robin,
I did exactly the same thing, with the exact same book. (I could have described the look on Uranus's and Gaea's faces before doing the deed sight unseen, but seeing it again to make sure was well worth it.)
This is one of the books (like The Hobbit/LOTR, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Phantom Tollbooth) we should all buy our children. There is nothing like the spark felt by reading a book as a child just a little beyond you, just a little strange, and entirely capable of conjuring an entire world in the imagination.
Dude, I still HAVE D'Aulaire's book of Greek Myths. It ROCKS. My mother and sister used to read it to me until I took over. I probably partially learned to read from it. I used to try and write like that fake Greek writing with the Triangular D's and Pronged Es. I can totally conjure up the illustrations in my head, right now, 50 miles away from the book---Persephone and Hades, the creepy stare of Medea, Jason sewing his dragon's teeth, sneaky baby Hermes, Zeus as a Bull, the Golden Shower, Athena blowing her dual pipe. In 8th grade it was very handy for our Panathena project, I got all my ideas for my team's altar to Demeter out of it.
Sometimes I think the main reason I'll want to have children is so I can buy them books. Phantom TollBooth: first full book my sister read to me through and through (followed by the Wizard of Oz.) Another beautiful book that sits next to D'Aulaires: Favorite Tales of Shakespeare, with amazingy retellings of Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and 12 Night or What You Will, and the most gorgeous illustrations. My mother bought it for me in Stratford upon Avon.
"...I got all my ideas for my team's altar to Demeter out of it."
Saheli, clearly you either went to school in:
a) Greece in the year 500 B.C., or
b) California.
No, but seriously, this is exactly what I'm talking about. I love it that this was such a salient experience for so many (nerdy) kids.
When teaching summer school a couple years back, I used D's Greek Myths as my primary text, precisely because I had noticed during the school year how oddly strong the appeal of myth was to my students -- even those would not fall into the nerdy or geeky core demographic for the book.
I wish I could say that I was fascinated by the book as a child, but I'm afraid I always got books about Bald Eagles out from the library.
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