DREAMY ADOLESCENCE

I was probably a peculiar fourteen year old. For which I give all credit to my home environment.
My older brother Tobias was the local chess prodigy, and had thousands of games memorized. He could also quote all of Charles Dickens, and the bible in both Dutch and English.
These eccentricities made holding a conversation with him hard, as his grammar school friends one by one had discovered. His friends from the Hertog Jan College were a bit more like him.

There was only one of them with whom I really got along - he lent me Multatuli's book 'Max Havelaar'. It was the first Dutch book I had read in quite a while at the time - we did not have many Dutch books in the house.
[It wasn't untill later that I discovered the Dutch poets and playwrights, as well as many fine writers. What I read was in our bookshelves, and that reflected the home language.]


My mother was an avid reader, and regularly received packages from Blackwells. At one point I tried counting how many books were in the house, and gave up at around five thousand, with probably a far greater number not included in the count. Of course not all of the books were hers, but many of them were.
Between the four of us we were probably responsible for quite a bit of deforestation, as there were bookshelves in every room including the hayloft over the stables. And one of the sheds.


Children's books. Science Fiction. Poetry. Mythology. Art.
Reference. Textual Criticism. Architecture. Religious Studies.
Old Norse, Old Irish, Old English - in the original languages, plus translated, annotated.
Mystery Novels.
Medicine.


That last category was one shared by both of my parents, though neither were medical people.


By the time I was fourteen I had read all of Kipling, Saki (H.H. Munro), Shakespeare, Nabokov, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Simenon, Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, plus Tanach and the Christian Subsequentia.
All of the National Geographic mags published between 1950 and 1974. Ditto for all issues of The Magazine of Fantasy And Science Fiction, from founding date in 1949 onward. Two and a half decades worth of Scientific American. A decade and a half of Horizon Magazine. The Larouse Gastronomique.


The medical books I browsed through had told me all about human reproduction and digestion by the time I was nine, and I had gotten into trouble at school when Mijnheer Goes discovered me drawing a detailed diagram of the urinary system for my classmates - with "witty" asides about all the things that could go wrong.
The Merck Manual inflamed my imagination with all manner of fascinating diseases, their diagnosis and prognosis, and the recommended treatment.
I happily quoted clinical jargon, and got sent home for using 'bad language'.


I also read Candide by Voltaire.

Not because I was precocious and intellectual, which you might expect me to claim (I won't), but because the cover intrigued me.


THERE WAS A NAKED BREAST ON THE COVER!


A BEAUTIFUL GORGEOUS CREAM-HUED WELL-ROUNDED PERKY BREAST!!!

WITH A ROSY NIPPLE!!!!!


I read the entire book very attentively trying to find that breast.
Which, of course, also explains much of the Science Fiction I had read, as pulp-covers were delightfully lurid and imagination-sparking. You've seen the illustration style - buxom young thing with fruity cleavage is distressed in the fore-ground, a very handsome and erect rocket is in the middle distance, the mountains and sky in the background are not on earth.
Like Candide, the covers had very little if anything to do with the contents. But the Sci-fi was infinitely more interesting than Candide, much of which must have gone right over my head.


Now, at fifty years of age, I have little urge to read anymore Science-Fiction, but I think I ought to try reading Candide again.
Perhaps I will finally find that naked breast.
If I do, it will remind me of my well-spent youth.