Firmin Read Online Free

my family a break and carry my chewings out into the stacks. It was Sunday morning the first time I ventured out. The shop above was closed, and there was almost no traffic in the Square to add its distant harmony to the blended snores of my stupefied family. Slipping down the passageway that led from our homey corner and out into the flickering big room, nose to the floor, the first thing I came across, sprawled open on the cement, was the Great Book itself, or what was left of it. I recognized it instantly by its smell. Inhaled in this concentrated, multifoliate form, hundreds of pages packed densely together, it made me a little queasy. The Impact of Genius . I looked up at the remaining books in the low shelf from which Mama had dragged this one and found that I could make out the titles quite easily. Obviously even at that early age I was already suffering from the catastrophic gift of lexical hypertrophy, which has since done so much to mar the smooth course of what might otherwise have been a perfectly ordinary life. Above this group of shelves was a handwritten paper sign bearing the word FICTION and a crude blue arrow pointing straight downward. As I explored the room further in the days and weeks that followed I came across other signs saying HISTORY, RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE, BARGAINS, and RESTROOM.
     
    I regard this period as the decisive beginning of my education, even though the craving that was driving me out from my cozy corner and into the big world was not yet a hunger for knowledge. I began with the closest shelves, the ones under FICTION, licking, nibbling, savoring, and finally eating, sometimes around the edges, but usually, whenever I could pry the covers open, straight through the middle like a drill. My favorites were the Modern Library editions, and I always chose one of those when I could, perhaps because of their logo - a runner with a torch. At times I have thought of myself as a Runner with a Torch. And oh, what books I discovered during those first intoxicating days! Even today the mere recitation of the titles brings tears to my eyes. Recite them, then, say them slowly aloud and let them break your heart. Oliver Twist. Huckleberry Finn. The Great Gatsby. Dead Souls. Middlemarch. Alice in Wonderland. Fathers and Sons. The Grapes of Wrath. The Way of All Flesh. An American Tragedy. Peter Pan. The Red and the Black. Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
     
    My devourings at first were crude, orgiastic, unfocused, piggy - a mouthful of Faulkner was a mouthful of Flaubert as far as I was concerned - though I soon began to notice subtle differences. I noticed first that each book had a different flavor - sweet, bitter, sour, bittersweet, rancid, salty, tart. I also noticed that each flavor - and, as time passed and my senses grew more acute, the flavor of each page, each sentence, and finally each word - brought with it an array of images, representations in the mind of things I knew nothing about from my very limited experiences in the so-called real world: skyscrapers, harbors, horses, cannibals, a flowering tree, an unmade bed, a drowned woman, a flying boy, a severed head, field hands looking up at the sound of an idiot howling, a train whistle, a river, a raft, sun slanting through a forest of birches, a hand caressing a naked thigh, a jungle hut, a dying monk.
     
    At first I just ate, happily gnawing and chewing, guided by the dictates of taste. But soon I began to read here and there around the edges of my meals. And as time passed I read more and chewed less until finally I was spending almost all my waking hours reading and chewed only on the margins. And oh, how I then regretted those dreadful holes! In some cases, where there were no other copies, I have had to wait years to fill the gaps. I am not proud of this.
     
    Now, buffeted and stunned by life, I look back at my childhood in the hope of finding there some confirmation of my worth, some sign that I was destined at least for a time to be