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Authors: Cynthia Pelman
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sees one in her flat she actually phones my dad to come over and get rid of it for her. I asked her how it felt to be scared of spiders, and she said, “It’s not that I am scared of them, they are just disgusting to me, I can’t explain it.” And she actually shuddered when she was telling me.
But I could see that her feeling about spiders is not a real phobia, because feeling really disgusted, even shuddering with revulsion, is not the same as the fear people feel if they have a phobia. She doesn’t feel terror, and she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I had told her about the Heart Attacker.
Mrs. E. was still talking about what was going on in school between me and my teachers.
“I wonder,” went on Mrs. E., with her pondering expression, hand on her chin, head tilted to the side, “I wonder why it is that after Silence left you alone for so many years, since you were about seven and you stopped coming to speech therapy, it is now trying to make a comeback? What is it that Silence has noticed in your life that makes it think it can come back again?”
I didn’t know what to say. This was a new idea for me, to think of silence as a thing, or as a character with a name, not as something that is just – me. And to think of being silent not as something that the Heart Attacker made me do, or (these days) as something I choose to do, my preference, but rather as something that you can give a name to and ask questions about, in the same way that you can name a character in a detective story.
Anyway we had come to the end of the session and I had to leave, and I was glad actually, not because it felt bad talking about this but because it was a whole new idea, and I like to think about my ideas on my own, in my room, and maybe write them down in a Moleskine notebook.
12
The perfection of
Moleskine notebooks
School is a problem for me and my real life is totally separate from my school life.
I think I should never have gone to school. I have two reasons for saying this. The first reason is that I was always perfectly happy going around the world with my mother and father and seeing all those places and hearing different languages. I presume that my parents must have decided that when I was five they would have to obey the law and send me to school, because all children from a certain age have to go to school, but in those days I didn’t know anything about the law. And the fact is that I learned so much from travelling: so much geography and geology and history, and I got to listen to and sometimes even understand so many languages.
A wonderful thing I learned while on travels with my dad was about archaeology. My dad is sometimes asked to accompany a dig so that they can consult with him about geological issues like different rock and soil types, to help them decide on a date for something they have found, and we often went with my dad to see the dig and to watch them discover new finds. Maybe that is what started me off on my interest in digging and searching and discovering things that have been lost.
These are things that you would probably never learn at school.
The other reason I think school was of no use to me is that everyone says that children have to go to school to learn to read, but I already knew how to read before I started school. I learned to read when we were still travelling with my dad to all those faraway countries and deserts. Every morning, while my dad was at work, my mom and I would find a place to go and sit and have tea or a cold drink and she would read to me and point to each word as she read. I think I must have been about four when she bought me the first of my Moleskine black notebooks and started teaching me the letters and sounds and how they join together to make words.
So I could read even before I started school, and I didn’t need to go to school to learn to read. And now, I can find any information I need online and I don’t need a teacher to tell me
But I could see that her feeling about spiders is not a real phobia, because feeling really disgusted, even shuddering with revulsion, is not the same as the fear people feel if they have a phobia. She doesn’t feel terror, and she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I had told her about the Heart Attacker.
Mrs. E. was still talking about what was going on in school between me and my teachers.
“I wonder,” went on Mrs. E., with her pondering expression, hand on her chin, head tilted to the side, “I wonder why it is that after Silence left you alone for so many years, since you were about seven and you stopped coming to speech therapy, it is now trying to make a comeback? What is it that Silence has noticed in your life that makes it think it can come back again?”
I didn’t know what to say. This was a new idea for me, to think of silence as a thing, or as a character with a name, not as something that is just – me. And to think of being silent not as something that the Heart Attacker made me do, or (these days) as something I choose to do, my preference, but rather as something that you can give a name to and ask questions about, in the same way that you can name a character in a detective story.
Anyway we had come to the end of the session and I had to leave, and I was glad actually, not because it felt bad talking about this but because it was a whole new idea, and I like to think about my ideas on my own, in my room, and maybe write them down in a Moleskine notebook.
12
The perfection of
Moleskine notebooks
School is a problem for me and my real life is totally separate from my school life.
I think I should never have gone to school. I have two reasons for saying this. The first reason is that I was always perfectly happy going around the world with my mother and father and seeing all those places and hearing different languages. I presume that my parents must have decided that when I was five they would have to obey the law and send me to school, because all children from a certain age have to go to school, but in those days I didn’t know anything about the law. And the fact is that I learned so much from travelling: so much geography and geology and history, and I got to listen to and sometimes even understand so many languages.
A wonderful thing I learned while on travels with my dad was about archaeology. My dad is sometimes asked to accompany a dig so that they can consult with him about geological issues like different rock and soil types, to help them decide on a date for something they have found, and we often went with my dad to see the dig and to watch them discover new finds. Maybe that is what started me off on my interest in digging and searching and discovering things that have been lost.
These are things that you would probably never learn at school.
The other reason I think school was of no use to me is that everyone says that children have to go to school to learn to read, but I already knew how to read before I started school. I learned to read when we were still travelling with my dad to all those faraway countries and deserts. Every morning, while my dad was at work, my mom and I would find a place to go and sit and have tea or a cold drink and she would read to me and point to each word as she read. I think I must have been about four when she bought me the first of my Moleskine black notebooks and started teaching me the letters and sounds and how they join together to make words.
So I could read even before I started school, and I didn’t need to go to school to learn to read. And now, I can find any information I need online and I don’t need a teacher to tell me
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