Bedrest at my parents' new home in Richmond, California, cared for by an overworked mother who had no time for library jaunts. I had the 1936 one volume Shakespeare edited by William Aldis Wright and illustrated by Rockwell Kent which I had bought in New Orleans in 1953 and had read at intermittently since then. This time, I started reading, and, after the first time through the plays, decided that I had better assume that the words made sense and tried to think I understood every passage before going on to the next. That decision made me a reader. Now that I have to do floor exercises in the middle of the night I have watched enough "World War 2 in Colour" and the like and on New Year's Eve found out how to play free readings of Shakespeare on the computer. Yesterday I was listening to Cymbeline and see that in the 1956 session I read it on January 4, February 2 and 16, March 8, April 9, May 4 and 9, 1956, and later, after getting out of bed, August 24 1956 and January 23, 1957 and then December 11, 2007, the movie with Helen Mirren and Claire Bloom, the last act several times before sending the disk back. It is, after all, the greatest prolonged reconciliation text in existence, isn't it? January 4, 1956 to yesterday, January 1, 2020. Well, I can't calculate that far. But I am set for another several month session with Shakespeare without having to strain from the floor to see the monitor. Days, we are packing and taping bankers boxes of Melville books and research papers and sending them off to the Berkshire Athenaeum. It's a plan. When I read MOBY-DICK in eleven afternoons there in Richmond early in 1957 (afternoons because I had to lie down after carrying air pumped into my belly to keep my lungs from overworking) I could hardly believe that a young American man could have absorbed Shakespeare the way Melville had. Now to Cymbeline.
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