A pleasure that's a kind of wealth

 I’ve been following a reader’s progress through James Joyce’s Ulysses. The reader is Michael Leddy, a retired English professor. It’s been fun to see his notes on this 100-year-old novel.

I think of that pleasure as a kind of wealth. Maybe that sense of wealth is part of what came into me through the culture. It’s a way of thinking that’s so close to me that I’m hardly aware of it.

But I feel rich when I feel the pleasure of a good book — or get to listen in on the discussion of a challenging book by a discerning reader.

The poet William Stafford did a better job of expressing this idea. So I’ll let him take over.

Stafford spoke of the wealth and poverty he experienced as a boy in Kansas. Here’s the poverty:

That Christmas Mother made paper

presents; we colored them with crayons

and hung up a tumbleweed for a tree.

Here’s the wealth:

the library had books we hadn’t read.

It’s not just me. For some of us, this kind of thing is more fun than Christmas, more joyous than payday.

Sources: You can see what I’m talking about on the pleasure of seeing a good reader read a good book at Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art, at https://mleddy.blogspot.com. The quotations are from the poem “The Rescued Year” in William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 107-109.