Sherwin B. Nuland
The Book that Changed
My Life? The one work in particular that influenced
my own writing?
That's easy. It was the very first volume I took
out after getting my card at the Kingsbridge Branch
of the New York Public Library, when I was seven.
Its title was as unforgettable as the effect it
had on me, although I have no recollection of
the author's name. Ab the Cave Man transformed
my notion of what a book was capable of being.
Until then, my contact with reading had been the
stultifying Dick and Jane stuff of the classroom
-- I had no idea that reading could be fun, that
a boy could be transported to another place and
another time, and become so engrossed by descriptions
and characters that he lost all consciousness
of his surroundings, his worldly concerns and
the very hour of the day.
I was a kid to whom no one at home had ever read.
The adults in my family were immigrants whose
means would be exaggerated were I to refer to
them as modest. Spoken English was difficult enough
to deal with, by mastering the prined work had
proven beyond the capacity of the limited attention
they could pay to it, in the mist of their struggles
toward mere survival in this confusing country.
But the lesson of their failed example was clear
-- the English language was the real passport
to America and to worlds I had never imagined.
To suddenly realize with the first few pages of
Ab the Cave Man that books were actually
the stuff of which dreams were made, was the revelation
after which neither English nor the notion of
narrative would ever again be the same. Something
previously undiscovered in my spirit was revealed
by that little volume -- it influenced me every
time I pick up my pencil to write.
Sincerely, Sherwin
Nuland |
