A Thought on The Virginian

So I’m reading this classic western The Virginian, and one detail keeps forcing its way front and center for me.

Seems the Virginian has his eye on this school marm, and she her eye on him, to the extent he keeps a-callin’ for an afternoon horse ride with her, and she fancies educating his untamed mind. So they strike themselves a compromise: she’ll give him a book, and when he finishes it, he can come a-callin’ on her for a ride.

What does she give him?

Well, the author doesn’t out-and-out say, but implies: a detective story, a “Shakespeare”, a Russian novel. (That “Russian novel” bugs me – Dostoevsky, perhaps? Sadly, I’m lacking in my “Russian novels.”)

The thing is, it takes him about two months to read one of her books.

Two months!

One book!

Now, I’m not mocking him. No, I’m envious in a weird sort of way.

Take the Virginian. He has – no commute, no wife, no children, no soccer practice, no girl scouts, no trips to the dry cleaners or grocery store or recycling center or library. He doesn’t spend two hours a week in front of a computer balancing his checkbook and paying bills. He has no teevee, no DVR, no DVD-player.

Yeah, he has to take care of cattle from sunup to sundown. Yeah, he has to hunt his own food, unless biscuits and jerky satisfy his hunger. Yeah, he has no electricity, so he would have to read by campfire (or candlelight) if he wants to do some serious nocturnal reading.

But I can imagine him at noon, lounging under a tree with the herd spread out on the fields and watering holes below, reading that Dostoevsky for an hour or more. He could probably do the same by the evening campfire, provided there wasn’t a card game up or an overly social companion jawboning his ear off.

Two months – that’s about sixty hours of reading time by my reckoning.

I put the average science fiction paperback away in three to five hours. A hardcover history of five or six hundred pages … maybe a dozen hours.

How I would learn a book if it was the only thing for miles and miles to read and I had five to ten times as many hours to read it … to absorb it … to experience it.

That’s why I’m envious of the Virginian.

Of course, I’d probably be scalped in my sleep were I in his shoes. And he might sit mouth agape watching me type this post into my “magic box.”