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A Book with a View

A Book with a View

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2022-02-23

It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.


These words were written by Anne Frank, 13 years old, hiding in an attic. The Germans would find her, and she would die from exhaustion. But, in cramped confines, with evil on the loose, she wrote of hope and empathy. When you read her diary, you think about where her words were sculptured, the idea that, with death knocking on the door, all her innermost thoughts and desires were released.


While without all the attendant violent pressure, I too spent my childhood bunkered down, in an alcove. A bookshelf for company. Looking outwards and inwards. A bookish 'room with a view'.


WH Auden once suggested that the book one reads "should somehow be at odds with the place in which it's read". Once, when travelling on a boat up the River Niger in Mali (a story for another day), the only book I had to read was Stephen King's, The Shining, left in a hotel room by a previous owner. lts's grisly, psychic shenanigans and brutal language leaping alongside the boat's gentle chug, the riverbank's mud buildings and call to prayer the only sounds to ruffle the peace and pace of the river.


I think about books like layers of fabric. I feel their texture, move my hands over the words and drown in the colour. This is why books are back in vogue. In a world in which we are cut off from each other, where touch is frowned upon, where mas ks hide our expressions, books make us come alive, live inside another's head, travel across oceans, catapult us back into childhood. Reading has the ability to both close and open the world around us.


On Sunday afternoon, I went to Durban's beach and read; people moving around, children laughing, people surfing not the net but waves. There is something murmuring about the corner of Durban's waterfront that gives us a window into the bay. How did Anne Frank put it? 'I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.'