Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Lydia taught me to read. She gave me reading the way she gave me language to begin with — but it was sitting alone for long hours in Mr. Lawrence’s library, that beautiful room, sliding one book after another from their tight ranks on the shelves and inspecting their contents all day, following each line of text like a line of marching ants that was sure to lead somewhere interesting, which expanded and improved my reading, along with my knowledge of the world. In that sense I was an autodidact. In the early days I would have to sound each word aloud as I read, and later silently in my head, and then I came to a point at which each word was in a sense heard , in another sense seen (as a picture), and in yet another sense abstract. That is to say, when I read the word cow , at least three things occur in my mind: I hear the sound of an inner voice saying the word; I see the physical picture that these three letters make on the page (which is a symbol); and I half-see, on another plane in my consciousness, a kind of platonic-ideal image of a cow. And in these two latter senses of a written word — the physically pictorial and the purely abstract — a word is just there , on the page, not necessarily fully representative of sounds that exist in language outside of ink and paper, but ripe with unique qualities of its own. I am amazed that people can learn with so much ease to perform the metaphysical acrobatics that reading written language requires. The invention of writing and reading might be the single most miraculous achievement of the human mind.

So, to sum up: in time, all in time, I learned to speak and eventually to read at the Lawrences’ ranch in Colorado. I admit that mine is a somewhat unusual memoir, Gwen, for several reasons. This is one of them: most memoirists do not feel weighed down by the onus of having to describe the process of learning to speak. That much is easily granted them. One wouldn’t find it strange for a memoir written by a fully biological human to begin with something like “The first thing I remember is,” or “My parents were poor but honest.” We do not demand that human memoirists first explain how they became capable of language before getting down to the business of telling their stories. If one could teach a stone to talk, I’m sure the stone would forever thereafter live a life of unending frustration that its every conversation begins with someone being flabbergasted to hear its voice before listening to what it has to say. The stone would lead a lonely life of never being heard. What good is it being a talking stone in the land of the deaf?

So if our readers look through these pages searching for a water-pump moment, some great, finite, epiphanic ah- ha when language pokes a hole in my brain and comes trickling, then flooding rapidly in until my head is full, then I am sorry to disappoint them. It simply doesn’t work that way. Everything is a process, nothing is instantaneous. Take for example this cup on this table, Gwen. Look at it. Try to imagine what it would look like to a silent-minded animal. It is not a cup, neatly separated by the word from everything around it. It is not a table, either. That cup and that table do not necessarily have anything in common with any other cups or tables in the world. Everything is immediate and everything is unique. But gradually, as words take root in your mind, without consciously realizing how you got there, there will come a day when you look at that cup and think, with coherent exclusivity, cup . You do not bother thinking also of the room the cup is in, or the gravity that anchors it to the table and the table in turn to the earth. That object has been slotted away in a compartment of your consciousness reserved for a certain kind of drinking vessel, and now, upon seeing it for the first time, you may fill it up with water and drink from it without first being amazed that it exists. In a way language is an inner death of that sense of perpetual amazement at the ever-renewed world. But there’s a lot of terror mixed in with that amazement, that constant process of discovery, terror that dies along with that amazement, terror that we need to get rid of before we can get down to the business of being human. We gain language and lose the amazement, and afterward yearn to have it back, while at the same time we are always using our words as sticks to beat back the terror that crouches always just behind us, in our past, in our bodies, in our delicate animal selves.

After I had learned to speak and read English with some proficiency, Mr. Lawrence undertook to expand my mind: to instruct me in music, logic, philosophy, and the liberal arts — to guide me on explorations of the subjects that have as their focus the search for what it means to be human. He hired tutors in various subjects: there was a woman who came to the house from time to time to give me piano lessons, for example. I regret that I was never able to grasp the making of music. My hands are awkwardly shaped, and they did not conform easily to the dexterous motions that piano playing requires. Little matter, though. Mr. Lawrence would play me classical symphonies and opera. Mr. Lawrence and Clever and I would recline on the couches and chairs in his office, letting our minds be transformed and transported as Eroica boomed from his Bang & Olufsen speakers. I fell in love with classical music — especially Beethoven. Someone once said, Gwen, that the solar system consists of “Jupiter, and debris”: similarly, I would say that classical music consists of Beethoven, and debris. What more is there to say about music, Gwen? I must agree with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake. It’s a mistake anyway, but it’d be a worse mistake.

Mr. Lawrence also tried to instruct me and Clever in logic and philosophy. He built a small schoolroom in the big house, with a whiteboard on the wall and two little desks. There Mr. Lawrence in the role of professor spoke to us of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, Kant and Hegel. He spoke to us of history and politics, of mind and matter, of skepticism and faith, of natural right and the state of nature, of man and god and law.

Sometimes he would play us classical music while Clever and I sat on the floor and drew or painted or made little clay sculptures. Sometimes he would show us films of Shakespeare plays (this was my first exposure to the Bard). Mr. Lawrence insisted that we have exposure to the long golden procession of art and ideas, the great conversations throughout the history of human thought, all the sweetness and light of civilization, the sweetness and light.

I remember, for instance, Mr. Lawrence telling us about Xeno’s paradox. For some reason I remember that lesson very clearly. It was presented to me in the illustration of a frog and a pond.

“Say there is such-and-such a distance between a frog and a pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and uncapped a black dry-erase marker, and with a few squeaky strokes on the whiteboard rendered an illustration of a tree, a tract of land represented by a flat horizontal line, and a pond. A sun with a face on it gazed down on the scene. He uncapped a blue marker and drew a squiggly line inside the pond — to indicate water — then with a green marker drew squiggly lines on the ground (grass) and in the fluffy top of the tree (leaves), and with a brown marker he drew a squiggly line inside the trunk of the tree. “The frog is sitting under the tree.” Beneath the umbrage of the tree’s canopy he drew a picture of a frog. The drawing looked like this: