I still love to read, of course. I read differently now that I am in my right mind, but I return to old friends. No Snickidy Lime: "This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me?" What more satisfying lines for a brooding adolescent? But I only saw half, and ignored the other side of the poem: "The simple News that Nature told?With tender Majesty."At Mother's house I recently found my dusty Complete Emily Dickinson with its margins littered shockingly by my old palindromes: Evil deed live! croaked that other Adah, and I wonder, Which evil was it, exactly?Such childhood energy I spent on feeling betrayed. By the world in general, Leah in particular. Betrayal bent me in one direction while guilt bent her the other way. We constructed our lives around a misunderstanding, and if ever I tried to pull it out and fix it now I would fall down flat. Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.They are what we call civilization.
Lately I've started collecting old books that are famous for their misprints. There's a world of irony in it. Bibles, in particular. I've never actually seen any of these in original editions, but back in the days when print was scarce, only one printing of the Bible was widespread at any given time, and people knew it by heart. Its mistakes became celebrated. In 1823 when the Old Testament appeared with the verse "And Rebekah arose with her camels"?instead of damsels?it was known as the Camel's Bible. In 1804, the Lions Bible had sons coming forth from lions instead of loins, and in the Murderers' Bible of 1801, the complainers in Jude 16 did not murmur, they murdered. In the Standing Fishes Bible, the fishermen must have looked on in such surprise when "the fish stood on the shore all the way from Engedi to Eneglaim." There are dozens of these: the Treacle Bible, the Bear Bible, the Bug Bible, the Vinegar Bible. In the Sin-On Bible, John 5:14 exhorted the believers not to "sin no more," but to "sin on more!" Evol's dogl Dog hoi