
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 20, 1993                   TAG: 9309220318
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LEND A BOOK

Text IN AUGUST, a friend lent me a book by Wayne Fields entitled "What the River Knows: An Angler in Midstream." "It's so much better than 'A River Runs Through It'," she said.

I took the book - because it was about fly-fishing, because she compared it to "A River Runs Through It" (a book I loved), but primarily because my friend wanted me to have it.

When you lend a friend a book, when you press it upon her enthusiastically, you say, implicitly or explicitly, "Here is something intimate of me that I want you to know." For, as much as she wants to share with you what the book's author has written, your friend also wants to share that private, deep part of herself that this particular book has touched.

My friend has highlighted passages of "What the River Knows." Not for me, for she didn't know that I'd be reading this book when she first read it; but for herself. "Here!" each highlighted passage notes, "here is truth."

The passages that she's highlighted are not the same passages that wring my heart. So I'm discovering as I read that these highlighted sentences reveal to me more of my friend, who is a poet, than of this book's author.

"I am not so arrogant that I write to tell some great truth, that I think the world has much to gain from my undersized hands;" my friend has highlighted in Fields' text. "I write in the hope of crafting a page, a paragraph, even a line that is filled with the grace I lack, that sings with a voice beyond mine. I write in the hope of forgiveness, in the hope of making something better than myself."

When I was a kid, I devoured books; I read madly, as fast as I could, cover to cover, sometimes reading all night long just to get to the end. The point was to read as many books as possible. (Even so, I never read nearly as many as my contemporaries.)

In high school, although I didn't stop reading, I was deeply distracted from it by other adolescent insanities. So when I returned to reading in college, it was almost like taking up a new pursuit. A serious, plodding, academic pursuit, requiring deep concentration and totally without a sense of humor. I got myself a little ruler and underlined pertinent, important sentences in my books with passionate precision. Crazy as a loon again.

Then I stopped underlining altogether. I discovered that, indeed, you can read a good book more than once, finding new significances; and my old underlinings distracted me from new understandings. "Why in the world did I underline that?" I kept stopping to think.

Now I believe I'll take up underlining again. Mark my self now for rediscovery by my self in the future; mark my self for any friends who may care to look for me in my books.

In "What the River Knows," my friend has highlighted the name of every flower mentioned: joe-pye weed, butter-and-eggs, lobelia, black-eyed susan, goldenrod, tansy. I should have known she'd do that: celebrate even the slightest beauties, the tiniest gifts. It will be a special treat, picking out a book of mine to lend her in return.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a columnist for the Roanoke Times & World-News.

by CNB