I first met Heathcliff one winter’s night in Chinley Women’s Institute.
It was a wintry evening sometime in the 1960s and my seat was uncomfortable. Hot pot or pies were offered at the interval and the overlarge tea pots made the air warm and damp.
Returning to my mother’s Morris Minor parked at the top of a slope seemed a relief after the crowded heat of the hall and the harsh voices of the actors who all seemed permanently unhappy.
I can remember thinking Bronte’s world a mad world; noisy, uncomfortable and literally steamy!
Yet my meeting with Emily Bronte’s antihero must have lingered on somewhere about my brain because as soon as I heard the mention of ‘Chinley’ yesterday, there I was back to being 6 or 7, all wrapped up in my going out coat , feeling far from my home in Chapel-en-le-Frith appalled and spellbound by Wuthering Heights.
Our first meetings with books are often anchored to places and take the form of an ‘event’ in our remembrance, for what we meet in a book , we are of course meeting in ourselves.
This complex union between the outside act of picking up a book and beginning to read, and the inside act of experiencing the act of reading through our imagination, makes reading a compelling emotional sanctuary.
For no one knows what we really think about reading a book except ourselves. It’s an intensely personal and private experience, something that the kindle book boom proves….
Of course we can discuss books, we may even study books and gain qualifications in reading books, but only you know what you know, through your own reading filters, through your own emotional repertoire.
A long time ago a friend declared very honestly that ‘reading is a sneaky business.’ This seems very true!
So in your own writing, think about the memory anchors you can play with.
Think about the connotations of words like HOME as I spoke about in another blog article recently.
Remember how memory triggers intense emotion around an event through sensory impressions, whether it is the evocation of a word like CHINLEY or in the following very famous example from Proust, the mixing of a biscuit with a cup of tea!
… one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. ..Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?
That was a great opening line trigger about meeting Heathcliff, a winter’s night and Chinley WI, it put me right there asif it was my memory, my reading. i loved how you tied reading to memory and the intense feeling and pleasure it evokes. As the extract from Proust shows reading can evoke moments of bliss, and that’s a good enough reason for me to keeo doing it, thank you, Janet