I recently listened to my friend Miriam on YouTube, reading from “Moby Dick”. She was at the Moby Dick Marathon, an annual celebration of Herman Melville’s novel of a man obsessed with hunting down a white whale. Fans of the book gather every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in the northeastern state of Massachusetts. There is a dinner, and there are lectures and question-answer sessions with Melville scholars. Then the reading begins, with the immortal opening, “Call me Ishmael.” The slots are booked beforehand, and each reader takes up seamlessly where the previous one left off. As in an Indian wedding, people come and go whenever they like. They read non-stop for 25 hours this year, standing in front of a picture of a white whale stuck with harpoons. Melville worshippers at a distance followed parts of it online.
Miriam’s voice was as bracing as the Atlantic. In all the years we’ve been friends, I had never heard her read aloud. Her family is bookish and possibly did that sort of thing at home. Our family didn’t, at least when we were young. I think it’s a glorious tradition. We read stories to children to show them that joy comes out of books as well as boxes. At book launches, writers read from their newly released works. And in a gesture of protest and support at the Jaipur Literary Festival this year, four writers read aloud from “The Satanic Verses”. But what about simple companionable reading among friends, especially women friends?
In my favourite scene in “Gone with the Wind”, Scarlett and other women sit sewing in a circle while Melanie Wilkes reads out loud. “Chapter One. I am born,” she reads, the first lines of “David Copperfield”. And who can forget Lydia Bennet cutting in with gossip as Mr. Collins intones from Fordyce’s Sermons for the edification of the ladies?
Women used to read aloud to engage their minds while their hands completed a repetitive task. Workers read aloud in tobacco factories in Cuba, I hear. And in the sewing circles that must still gather in Kutch and Kashmir and Lucknow, maybe one woman in the group reads for the others? Women today still work on repetitive tasks, but they often work alone.
When quilting or embroidering I have often wished for a companion to read to me from one of those novels in which women are always quilting and embroidering. Audio books sometimes do the trick. I once stitched a baby quilt while listening to a tape of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. In an eerie evening, the patched comforter took shape in my hands while Morrison’s terrifying slave narrative and ghost story rent the air.
Some friends of mine now meet on Saturday afternoons in their office to read aloud from an essay or article or short story. They find it a lovely way to start the weekend. As I write this, they are collecting matter for World Poetry Day. I wish I could follow that online.
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