SECRETS

There is something so deliciously secret about reading a book.  It isn’t at all like watching a movie.  Even if you sit down to watch by yourself, you can never prevent someone else from coming along, sitting down, and watching with you, and suddenly it becomes a shared experience.

I’m a bit of a snob, that way.  When I was younger I never quite understood the attraction that secrets had for some of my peers – the whispering, the giggling, the widely advertised information that there was a secret, and that you would never know it, and don’t you wish you did?  I was of course as annoyed as the next person, and I can’t claim that I didn’t beg to be taken into confidence, but keeping secrets – the normal, I-know-someone’s-middle-name-and-I’m-not-telling kind – was small potatoes as far as I was concerned.  My young, snobby self had better secrets that were all the better because no one knew I had them.

I can’t quite explain what was ruined when I knew that someone else had read something which I particularly enjoyed.  I must have known that the story didn’t belong to me, because someone had of course written it, and I could not have believed that my copy of a book was the only one.  Still, reading a book was most wonderful to me – if it was a good book, of course, that always being a necessary prerequisite – because of its privacy.  I was going somewhere that no one else, in that moment, could go, even if they came and stood beside me.  I hoarded books jealously.  

There were perhaps times when I spoke favorably of books, but I did not often recommend them.  The difference is small, but it was important: I might say that a book was good, but I very infrequently urged another person to read it as well.  The secret was the experience of the story, which was what I was most anxious to keep to myself.  I did not realize at the time how very selfish this feeling was on my part.  I’d like to believe that I’ve become less selfish in the years since, even about beloved books.  But I had something beautiful, and I wanted to pretend that no one else had it.  

My family was once in the habit of reading books after dinner.  Every evening after dessert, we stayed in our seats while my father read a chapter, and we travelled the pages of many great works of fiction this way.  A book read aloud did not have the same allure as a book I could savor by myself, but I enjoyed these readings.  There were times, however, when I was severely tested.  To wait a full twenty-four hours to hear the next chapter of a book which I could have finished in an afternoon on my own seemed a cruel torture.

Finally, there came a time when waiting seemed out of the question.  I don’t remember what book it was – The Hobbit, maybe, or one of the Chronicles of Narnia – but I did something very sly, very crafty, very devious.  I snuck into the dining room once everyone had gone.  My parents were doing dishes in the kitchen, so I had to be very quiet.  I slid open the drawer which always held the current book.  I pulled out the tempting morsel and held it behind my back.  I knew that I was doing something very drastic, but I had to know how it ended.  There were only a few chapters left.  I hurried upstairs to my room and slipped the book under my pillow.

And when I was alone, I stealthily read the book’s conclusion.  And for just a moment, it was all mine – a delicious, glorious secret.