Columns

My Commonplace Book: The Other Side of the Bridge

By Dorothy Bryant
Tuesday June 28, 2011 - 12:09:00 PM

A page from My Commonplace Book ( a very old, traditional, personal literary form—a diary of short excerpts copied from printed books, with comments added by the reader): 

“ . . . a dark-green cover and the title, in gold print, English History. Arthur remembered it, dimly. Kings and Queens, dozens of them, wars, dozens of those too, and all of them with dates, as if anyone cared. Miss Karpenski said the purpose of studying history was that if you didn’t you were doomed to repeat it, but as far as Arthur could see the history books proved that you were doomed to repeat it anyway, so what was the point?”
The Other Side of the Bridge (2006), a novel by Mary Lawson

When I was the age of teenage “Arthur,” I was his opposite. I not only loved reading, but I shared my immigrant parents’ faith that in books and education lay the American dream of upward mobility. To their hopes for me, I added my own conviction that education was the key to wisdom, democracy, and world peace 

Yet, I sometimes wonder if “Arthur,” the low-achieving non-reader, reached an insight that makes all my reading seem merely escapist. We have lived in a century of unprecedented literacy and scientific innovation. The country leading these intellectual advances was Germany, which also produced Hitler, and inspired the addition of a new word to our language: genocide. 

Now, when young people ask me my view of life from my eighties, I tell them honestly, if evasively, that the older I get the less I know. If pressed for clarification—and in a bad mood—I may use a term that sums up “Arthur’s” opinion. “Reruns. You know, reruns of a horror movie, each one more bloody, clumsy, and senseless than the original.”