… to a group of students I don’t know (I was substituting for a colleague), a woman came up to the podium to talk to me.
I don’t know why I want to share this with you, but… A couple of winters ago, I was sitting with a friend in her house during a terrible snowstorm. The house had big windows everywhere, and the snow was falling really beautifully in all the windows and we took out Catcher and spent the whole day taking turns reading it aloud to each other. Start to finish, one sitting, with the snow falling… This is why I’ll never forget one page of that book…
I told the student that was a beautiful story and I thanked her for it (and I wondered – as I often do – why students tend to share things like this with me privately, after class, even though I’d love it, and it’d be great for discussion, if they’d tell everyone…), and she rushed off before I had a chance to tell her my story along those lines.
One summer UD was alone for a couple of weeks at the little Soltan house in upstate New York, and, over the course of a few sunny quiet days, she sat on the deck in a butterfly chair and read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The solitude, the slowness with which she read, the powerful natural setting — it made it so that, like her student today, UD took in that novel for good.