My Earliest Tryst with the Art of Reading! | Asimov
Almost every awe-inspiring autobiographer or memoirist has one beautiful quality that they so gently and beautifully pass it on through their pages quite carefully onto their readers – on how they’d extolled and celebrated that one beautiful skill that they’d acquired quite early on in their blessed lives – their very first tryst with their Reading!
While some of them acknowledge the influence of their teachers in moulding their reading skills, some others vouch with gratitude to the great influence of their mother or their father in developing their reading skills, while some others, although they had had parents who discouraged their reading, still have had the guts and the resolve to persevere hard enough and make it big in life – sometimes as big as the President of the USA even!
One mighty reason why inspiring autobiographies usually devote a major chunk of a chapter to describe with delight their debut date with their reading, and with such exceeding passion and verve!
An apt example to this credo would be Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, where she narrates her very first, hands on experience with reading!
Here goes Helen –
‘The next important step in my education was learning to read,’ says Helen.
‘As soon as I could spell a few words my teacher gave me slips of cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters. I quickly learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act, or a quality’.
‘I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the frame I used to make them in objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for example, “doll,” “is,” “on,” “bed” and placed each name on its object; then I put my doll on the bed with the words is, on, bed arranged beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same time carrying out the idea of the sentence with the things themselves’.
‘One day, Miss Sullivan tells me, I pinned the word girl on my pinafore and stood in the wardrobe. On the shelf I arranged the words, is, in, wardrobe. Nothing delighted me so much as this game. My teacher and I played it for hours at a time. Often everything in the room was arranged in object sentences’.
‘From the printed slip it was but a step to the printed book. I took my “Reader for Beginners” and hunted for the words I knew; when I found them my joy was like that of a game of hide-and-seek’.
Similar is the beautiful example of Booker T Washington’s earliest ever tryst with reading!
Says Washington, Booker T Washington in his autobiography titled, Up From Slavery -
‘From the time that I can remember having any thoughts about anything, I recall that I had an intense longing to learn to read’.
‘I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers. Soon after we got settled in some manner in our new cabin in West Virginia, I induced my mother to get hold of a book for me. How or where she got it I do not know, but in some way she procured an old copy of Webster's “blue-back” spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words as “ab,” “ba,” “ca,” “da.” I began at once to devour this book, and I think that it was the first one I ever had in my hands’.
‘I had learned from somebody that the way to begin to read was to learn the alphabet, so I tried in all the ways I could think of to learn it, — all of course without a teacher, for I could find no one to teach me. At that time there was not a single member of my race anywhere near us who could read, and I was too timid to approach any of the white people’.
‘In some way, within a few weeks, I mastered the greater portion of the alphabet. In all my efforts to learn to read my mother shared fully my ambition, and sympathized with me and aided me in every way that she could’.
‘Though she was totally ignorant, she had high ambitions for her children, and a large fund of good, hard, common sense, which seemed to enable her to meet and master every situation. If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother’,
says Booker T Washington with such gratefulness on him!
To the self-educated Abraham Lincoln, who was born in a log cabin, who then rose on to become the 16th President of the US, it was a great ordeal to even read! Well, that was because of his father Thomas, who couldn’t value the enormous powers contained within the art of reading!
In the huge, multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln titled, Abraham Lincoln – A Life (Vol.1), Burlingame offers narrates Abe’s initiation into reading, which was, to say the least, a baptism of fire!
Says Lincoln’s biographer –
‘Lincoln’s father regarded physical strength as sufficient to make a manly man and thought time spent on schooling was wasted. He would “slash” Abe for neglecting his work by reading’.
‘Sometimes he even threw out the boy’s books. Five years after Lincoln, at the age of 22, left his father’s home, Thomas Lincoln scoffed’ -
“I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he had got that fool idea in his head, and it can’t be got out. Now I hain’t got no eddication, but I get along far better than ef I had”.
‘Thomas then showed how he kept his accounts by marking a rafter with a piece of coal and proudly declared’ -
“that thar’s a heap better’n yer eddication”.
‘He added that, “if Abe don’t fool away all his time on his books, he may make something yet.”’
Well, almost on a similar vein is Isaac Asimov’s earliest appointment with his reading endeavours!
Says Asimov -
‘I learned to read before I went to school. Spurred on by my realization that my parents could not yet read English, I took to asking the older children on the block to teach me the alphabet and how each letter sounded. I then began to sound out all the words I could find on signs and elsewhere and in that way I learned to read with a minimum of outside help’.
‘When he found out I could read, [my father bought] me a small dictionary, “so you can look up words and know how to spell them.’”
‘My first thought was that it was surely impossible to find some one word among all the incredible number, but after I studied the book for a while, the workings of “alphabetical order” became plain and I asked my father if that was how the words were arranged. My father had clearly held back the information to see if I could work it out for myself, and was terribly pleased’.
‘[All this] gave my father the idea that there was something strange and remarkable about me. Many years later, he looked through one of my books and said, “How did you learn all this, Isaac?’”
“From you, Pappa,” I said.
“From me? I don't know any of this.”
“You didn't have to, Pappa,” I said.
“You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble”.
Asimov’s life story continues…
all images are from amazondotcom
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