Glog ENG 101 15

I’m a slow reader, which is strange for me to realize, as I’ve always been more or less steeped in academia, and have never really considered my reading skills to be deficient. But when I heard the orchestra conductor, a close friend, say, “You shouldn’t read individual notes in a line, just as you wouldn’t read individual words in a sentence,” I realized that my reading style was somewhat different from others’.

I can’t skim, or even read quickly. Reading a phrase at a time makes me feel rushed, and I seldom comprehend anything I’ve read. Even now, reading this essay, I push through my own paragraphs, realizing every word, as if reading over my shoulder as I wrote. As a reader, this makes me feel both handicapped and advanced. I believe that I read books the way authors inherently intended for them to be read: slowly, thoughtfully, appreciating each word (and realize that an author thinks about every word that he writes, so why should you not do the same, in trying to understand him). But, even while I may or may not read with heightened comprehension, the truth remains that in the past, when I was younger and had fewer people to guide me, I struggled to find reading material.

As a middle school student, I found young adult fiction to be riddled with empty sentences, boring and conceptually unreliable. I was both too careful to be infatuated or entertained with the allegories that were being fed to my classmates, and yet too innocent to realize the complexities (and adult humor) behind such stories as Alice in Wonderland and many of its Disney companions. And as my boredom increased, my reading experiences wandered, searching for more complex literature.

I stroked my ego as my child eyes grazed books borrowed from teachers. Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Things They Carried, all passed under my eyes long before I reached the necessary development to understand them. Not only did I not realize what I was missing in them, but I realized what all my past reading experiences had been missing: allusions, symbolism, and more styles and subtleties I had never been exposed to before. The symbolic eyes of Orwell’s 1984 followed me throughout the book in a way that Nancy Drew’s culprits never had, and I enjoyed that. With every word came something new, something to embrace, an award for reading slowly.

As I grew older, I revisited these novels from my childhood, realizing even more than I had before, but of course I followed the new yet beaten path of so many avid young readers… a classics list. I learned to know Steinbeck, Hemingway, Vonnaughat, Shelley, and so many more, easily gobbling the stories they told, and mischievously realizing their subplots, intentions, and contexts. I fell in love with characters; “carried them” as my AP English teacher calls it… Heathcliff and Nick Carraway, Pip and Larry Darrell.

And for a few years I was content with these themes, black and white, good and bad, with various shades of gray, relatable heroes and deformed villains, with analysis to be done, understanding to be met, etc. But, as for many people in my generation, it wasn’t enough. Even the least of cookie-cutter themes failed my attention…until I discovered Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the romance of a tragic hero named Humbert Humbert who fails to love anyone except young girls (roughly ages eight to fourteen) who he believes to be “nymphets.” These nymphets tease him like harlot fairies, unknowingly egging him toward his pedophile tendencies, and yet he realizes the errors of his infatuations, and revolts against his instincts toward these children. Throughout Lolita, you learn both to be enchanted by the handsome Humbert, and revolted by his feelings toward the young girls he comes in contact with.

While reading this book, I felt torn in a way that I never had before. I focused my love and hate toward the same character; a paradoxical reaction that seemed to rip my emotional spectrum open. I realized the potential of my emotional understanding in a way that escaped me before this experience. After reading Lolita, I began to view people differently. As a young adult, I was your typical, nerdy, brain-washed, DARE t-shirt wearing-kid, who believed that bad people were bad and good people were good. People who smoked were bad, and people who did their home work were good. People who stole were bad, and people who helped others were good. People who wanted to have sex with children were bad, but people who loved were good. Yet, Humbert (and many people after him) showed me exactly how short-sighted I was. Just like problems, methods, and issues, people were not black and white, good and bad, just and evil.

There’s a motion my former roommate used to do that I suggest you try. Put all of your fingers together (including your thumb) and put them to your head (temple, forehead, back of head, it doesn’t matter, be creative), and then, as you move your hand away from your head, open your fingers. Make a bomb sound. Now, do this as you realize that every thing you ever believed about people is completely smashed to smithereens. It’ll blow your mind.