Read Online Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman - Free Book Online

in the same weather! When his coach reached the hilltop, above the fog, he, like Hannibal, had a clear view of the scene. “I then understood the immense advantage which Hannibal derived from keeping his divisions on the heights, where he could see them all, and where they could all see each other, while the Romans were stumbling and groping, without the possibility of concert, through the thick haze below.”
Haec est nobilis ad Trasumennum pugna
. Such was the famous battle of Thrasymenus. Such was Macaulay’s conversation with the dead.
    W hat makes You-Are-There Reading so much more thrilling to us buffs than You-Are-Somewhere-Else Reading? I think it’s because the mind’s eye isn’t literal enough for us. We want to walk into the pages, the way Woody Allen’s Professor Kugelmass walked into
Madame Bovary
, triggering a flurry of scholarly confusion about the bald New Yorker in a leisure suit who had suddenly appeared on page 100. Failing that, the nearest
we
can come to Macaulay’s living “amidst the unreal” is to walk into a book’s physical setting. The closer we get, the better. For example, reading Steinbeck in Monterey won’t do; we must read him on Cannery Row. Even that backdrop falls short of perfection, for Cannery Row has changed more in a half century than Thrasymenus had in two millennia, and the details on the page no longer match the details before our eyes. The consummate You-Are-There experience requires us, like Macaulay, to see
exactly
what the author described, so that all we need do to cross the eidetic threshold is squint a little.
    I’ve never equaled the sensory verisimilitude of my friend Adam, who once read the ninth book of the
Odyssey
, in Greek, in what is believed to be the Cyclops’s cave, a Sicilian grotto Homerically redolent of sheep turds. But I have read Yeats in Sligo, Isak Dinesen in Kenya, and John Muir in the Sierras. By far my finest You-Are-There hour, however, was spent reading the journals of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition down the Colorado River, while I was camped at Granite Rapids in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
    In one crucial aspect, I bested Macaulay. Alone on his grand tour, he had no one with whom to share the rapture of Thrasymenus except the shade of Livy. In the Grand Canyon, I had George. It was our first vacation together, and it was full of revelations: that George was afraid of mice; that I never went backpacking without my baby pillow; that we both loved skinny-dipping in water so cold it gave us headaches.
    Alone on a beach of almost Caribbean whiteness, walled in by cliffs of black schist and pink granite, George and I had washed each other’s hair in the Colorado River and then settled ourselves next to the churning rapids with
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
. “G. reads from Powell,” I wrote by candlelight in my journal that night, “holding the book on his bare legs. Amazing to hear of Powell’s equipment and food and how hard it was for him to run the rapids, with the rapids
right in front of us
!!” There was an engraving of Granite Rapids in the book. Nothing had changed.
    “We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” read George. “Our boats, tied to a common stake, chafe each other as they are tossed by the fretful river… . We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” We had no idea at the time that these are among the most famous sentences in expedition literature. We thought we had discovered them. I am grateful for our innocence, just as I am grateful that I didn’t know then that Powell’s journals were hashed together from the skimpy notes he scrawled on strips of brown paper during the expedition, overlaid with impressions from a second trip two years later, further overlaid