Mary’s subsequent letters in Rambles deal with her touring of famous
sites in Venice—museums, palaces, canals, churches, islands; one letter deals
entirely with the class system in the city—and she notes That reading does not flourish here, may be gathered from the fact that
there is no circulating library, nor any literary society, such as are frequent
in country towns in France and England where people subscribe among one another
for the supply of books. And she muses further in a way that has some
unpleasant parallels to our lives in twenty-first century America: Meanwhile to live among people who do not
read—who do not desire to learn ….[1]
Of course, Mary could not really claim that
the people of Venice do not read ... do not desire to learn: There were
surely thousands of people there who were doing both—and happily so—just as
there are millions in our country who read, who desire to learn. It’s too easy—and always has been—for cultural
critics to glance around and see what they want to see.
I notice, for example, very few people
reading in the coffee shops I frequent … but can I leap from that to condemn the
country? I am fairly sure—no, positive—that
Americans no longer read in the numbers that they formerly did. But I am also
fairly sure—no, positive—that there
remain millions of us who prefer a
book to Twitter, a poem to Facebook. But many of us lurk underground these days
when having an education, having a passion for studying and learning are signs
to (too many) others that we are “elitist.”
I’m not “elitist”: Reading and studying and
writing are simply the activities I prefer in the late autumn of my years. And
these activities do not, by the way,
exclude any interest I have in, oh, Facebook (where I post often), in movies
(we go nearly every week), in TV series we like to stream (virtually every
night), in baking (as often as I can), in exercising (which has become harder,
more unpleasant in recent years), in spending as much time as I can with my
wife, in … You get the picture …
Late in October 1842, Mary and the others left
Venice and headed on to Florence—where she and Bysshe had lived twenty-three
years earlier. (And where—as I related many, many pages ago—a Gypsy woman
picked my pocket—with ease!—outside the main train station on April 22, 1999.
Happy Earth Day—and welcome to Florence!)
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