A Festival of Books?
 

BY S. Pathiravitana

YES. Why not a Festival of Books when there are Festivals of Flowers and Festivals of Films. For that is what I thought was happening at the BMICH in the past few days.

Those who have been to it have come back with the news that there was hardly any room to move around, far from getting close to the books to get a good look at them.

Such a spectacle made me wonder why there was such a scramble to buy books. Was it to satisfy an unbearable thirst for reading, which has come over our people or was it just another outing to get lost among the crowds, just for the fun of it, as it happens at these everyday festivals and carnivals.

Whatever the reason, there must have been high fun for some while the genuine book lovers may have been temporarily displaced and left disconsolate. Which brings me to the second question. What happens to all the books that our booklovers buy?

Do they actually sit down to read all of them to get their moneys worth? Or are they buying for the future, when some day perhaps they will have the leisure to pore over them? Just now I looked around my own library and was ashamed to discover a whole lot of books I had bought and some I received as gifts still waiting eagerly for me.

I picked up one of these left-to-languish books from my library, titled Civilizations, by an author not well-known at all.

I may have bought it because it was low priced for one thing and for another the many illustrations it contained, among which were the different means of writing adopted by various civilisations like the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, the cuneiforms of the ancient Persians and the writings of the Mayans.

This was an Indian publication and at the back of the book there were some ads displaying a few do-it-yourself books like Slimming, curing your Asthma and a learning to speak English, a rapid course, published in nearly all the existent Indian languages.

Surprise

The surprise in this book for me on opening it was to find a quotation prefacing this work. It was on civilization and it said, Civilization is a great word. It reads well - it is used everywhere - it bears itself proudly in the language. It is a big mouthful of arrogance and self-sufficiency.

The very sound of it flatters our vanity, and testifies to the good opinion we have of ourselves. We boast of Civilization as if we were really civilized, just as we talk of Christianity as if we were really Christians.

Yet it is all the veriest game of make-believe, for we are mere savages still: savages in the lust of the eye and pride of life - savages in our national prejudices and animosities, our jealousies; our greed and malice, and savages in our relentless efforts to overreach or pull down each other in our social and business relations. The author was Marie Corelli (1855 - 1924) writing to Nashs magazine.

Whatever happened to Marie Corelli? In the early twentieth century she was England's most popular novelist. She was, what would be called today, a feminist and along with Marie Stopes, who championed birth control, were the pioneers of this nascent minority movement.

She wrote a vast number of novels among which were Thelma, Ardath, The Sorrows of Satan, books that became texts for sermons by admiring clergymen. May be it's a good thing to accommodate her at the next Books Exhibition or rather Festival.

While looking around my own library for more neglected books, my eyes fell on a title called The Greeks.

I think I dipped into it once before for a brief moment and my re-discovery was due to my looking for a source, which would tell me something about democracy now that this word has been retrieved for our benefit for the current presidential election.

And when I looked into it this time I found it a very entertaining book for the simple reason that, though written by an academic, it is so lively, intelligent and often witty. H.D.F. Kitto was the Professor of Greek at the Bristol University and he tells you everything you want to know about the Greek way of life in the simplest of English.

In passing I noticed a pencil mark I had made against the phrase Man is a political animal. I read on to discover that according to Kitto we have got it all wrong. What Aristotle said, he says, is that Man is a creature who lives in a polis. And the big misunderstanding that has come about is over our ignorance of what a polis was which is an untranslatable word he says.

The best he offers is a description like this: The polis was a living community, based on kinship, real or assumed - a kind of extended family, turning as much as possible into family life... and as family life goes ...quarrels which were the more bitter because they were family quarrels.

City-state

The polis therefore is far from being what we call a city-state. But let me amble along on my trail of unread books and leave this exciting discovery of what a polis was for another day. Once a friend who was going to India asked me what I wanted. I suggested a book or two on Dravidian culture an area which we in this country are not too familiar with.

My friend, misunderstanding perhaps, brought me not two but about half a dozen books but to my disappointment all of them related only to Tamilnad. To most people Dravidian means only Tamil when there are three other Dravidian peoples to reckon with - the Malayalees, the Telugus and the Kannadas all well-known to the Sinhala historians. Draavida is the term the Aryans used to identify the southern direction. Not an ethnic but a geographical description.

So now I have on my hands a Social and Cultural History of Tamilnad, South Indian Festivities, The Hindu speaks on Religious Values and to save the situation a copy of Nilakanta Sastris A History of South India where I think some of my requirements may be met. All these books are now in the to-be-read waiting list.

But I think we should not be so hard on our buying books and not reading them. After all there are times when you are not in a mood to read when, as the saying goes, your spirit is willing but your flesh is not. This was not such a problem in your younger days.

Imagine, faced with such formidable books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina extending over hundreds and hundreds of pages how we didn't shrink from that task but ploughed through them.

Russian authors, pre-and post revolution, seem to have a weakness for length. I remember keeping up one whole night to finish a Sholokov novel - And Quiet Flows the Don. For what purpose I achieved that heroic I really don't know.

It was the same with Les Miserables. The fate of Cossette was really heartbreaking and you did everything possible to help Jean Valjean to overcome that ordeal. Yet the only thing you could do was to stand by these two characters by reading every page of that book right to the end.

Finish

The books I now buy cannot be read to a finish. They lie on the shelves patiently waiting to be read. If they had human voices they would shout as I pass by, Hey, when are you going to take me in your hands. I have been lying here for months and months and they are now turning into years. My youth will be long gone by the time you take me.

That's one kind of fatality that affects books. There's another kind. Some months back I bought a copy of Knox's Words hoping to get another perspective of my favourite Englishman.

My first impression told me that this is not the kind of book I have been looking for. I put it away telling myself that I'll take a second look later. In my search for little read or bought and forgotten books I looked around for the Knox and it had gone.

I know it is not easy to track down a missing book in my library since I do not follow the Dewey decimal system of classification. Nor is there anyone to put back the books I take down from the shelves.

So Knox's Words is absconding from me, I hope, temporarily. I also hope that the other neglected books haven't whispered to her what an absentminded master she has come to serve.