sensation, Oprah stated:
"There is something so noble & restrained about doing something extremely
well, and then stopping. I always felt as though she put every ounce of every word she
had to say into To Kill a Mockingbird, & then realized she had said enough, and was finished. Like pushing one's plate away when one is full, even if it still holds bits of cake."
Oprah received the following letter in 2006 from Harper Lee, age 80. Here is the letter:
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
May 7, 2006
Dear Oprah,
Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember
a time when you didn't know how? I must have learned from having been read to by
my family. My sisters & brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering
them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children's classic, & my father
read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was
Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.
So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American
history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius?
Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries.
Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s,
youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often -- movies weren't for small
children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, & the
Depression.
Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred
miles away from a department store's books section, so we children began to circulate
reading material among ourselves until each child had read another's entire stock. There
were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.
As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was
worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts.
Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a
series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed --- he swapped his sister's
doll buggy.
We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked
into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade,
& we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.
And it wasn't until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the
children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read
three-to-one----three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer
from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.
Now, 75 years later in an abundant society, where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods,
& minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for
me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember
it.
And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna
Karenina & being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah
Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up --some things should happen on soft pages, not
cold metal.
The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy
one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun & kept it until
it was retrieved by an irate parent.
Now we are three in number & live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still
keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: What is your name again?"
followed by "What are you reading."" We don't always remember.
Much love,
Harper
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The 1930s were 87 years ago. Where will we be in another 87 years, the year 2104? Will
everything come around full circle, will libraries be on the decline? What about eBooks?
Print books? How will we satisfy our need to read or will that need recline or be replaced?
What current book today will stand the test of time and be considered a classic in 2104?
Come join the discussion May 4 for To Kill a Mockingbird at 10 AM.