Walking

Yesterday, the T broke or something and I ended up walking from the Andrew Street Station, in South Boston, to Harvard, in Cambridge. Actually, I walked from the Broadway Street Station to Andrew, realized I was going the wrong way, turned around, and saw all of Boston in front of me. I am an idiot. However, it did give me plenty of time, while I was walking around, to read What Maisie Knew by Henry James. This was a splendid way to spend a sunny day, I thought. I have been fighting a long battle against What Maisie Knew, which was assigned to us in my Henry James class in late 2006, and which I didn't finish then and -- as of this writing -- still have not finished. I have ten pages left to go. I don't know why it is such a struggle to finish this book, which I enjoy mightily. The only other books that I have had such titanic battles with are Life of Johnson and Proust, both of which are Loose Baggy Monsters in a way that Maisie is certainly not.

One of my friends expressed incredulity that I can read and walk at the same time. "And with glasses!" she said. I don't know when or why I developed this talent, but I wonder if this peripatetic reading is a good or a bad method, and whether it is good or bad for Maisie in particular. I certainly feel as if the books I have read partially while ambulatory have been understood as well as any others. I still underline in them, for example, though I usually stop walking in order to do that. I have sometimes tried reading while driving, though I do not recommend it, not even for Maisie. At any rate, it is good to remember, on the eve of Bloomsday, the day celebrating the most peripatetic of novels, that you don't have to be stationary to read.

[Editor's note: this was written during a fourth quarter timeout in the Celtics-Lakers Game Five, which was indeed the day after the T stopped and the day before Bloomsday. It is now neither of those things, but the trusty MacBook ran out of batteries and didn't get replugged until now. So, uh, Happy Belated Bloomsday!]