I confess that I went through school being largely unaffected by books and the reading of them. Perhaps Shakespeare's, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth ; and a few pieces from the Victorian Education Department's justly famous 'readers' 1 stayed with me but only just. In secondary school, I was earmarked for the 'science' stream which further cut me off from reading literature. After school, I worked as a trainee industrial chemist for three years but then left to train as a primary (elementary school) teacher. In second-year teachers' college, we were taught English Literature by a grumpy, bitter, 'old' lecturer who transformed my indifferent outlook on literature and reading to one of excitement. (Although a scarey man in class, Mr D. was a kind and gentle man on a one-to-one basis .) As I write this now, I hear the thunder of his first lecture from 45 years ago: 'Art is not Nature; Nature is not Art'. He scorned the suppositio...
we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen --Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles