What was the first book you ever read, cover to cover, even to the point of neglecting meals?

Mine was C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” I’d found it in North Auburn Elementary School’s pocket-sized library in 1969, courtesy of our librarian, Mrs. Sidwell. This first volume in the seven-book series took me captive, and I quickly sucked up all the books in the set, down to “The Last Battle.”

Even today, 55 years removed from my baptism-by-book, the mere mention of those stories can still thrill me. I loved the books then, I love them now. Even today, I am a fool for a great read.

And a great recording, especially of poetry. One evening when I was a kid, I put an old vinyl recording of selections from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” read in the original Middle English by Oxford Professor Nevill Coghill, on the turntable and hit the switch.

It knocked me over. The sheer wonder of what I was hearing left me speechless. Beautiful things can do that. Years would pass before I was able to put into words what I felt at that moment: “The rhythm of beauty that stills the heart.”

James Joyce wrote about this peak experience in Chapter 4 of his “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In it, his main character, the artist in formation, Stephen Dedalus, a thinly-veiled version of Joyce himself, has glimpsed a beautiful girl on a river bank, and time, for him, stands still.

I quote the passage in full in the hope it may stir a memory of your own and you will understanding what I’m babbling about here. Speaking only for myself, I consider it one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.

“A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long, slender, bare legs were delicate as a crane’s, and pure, save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller, and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like the feathering of soft, white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted about her waist and dove-tailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft, as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove, but her long, fair hair was girlish, and girlish her face, touched with the wonder of mortal beauty.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea. And when she felt his presence, and the worship of his eyes, her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze, and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot, hither and thither, hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low, and faint, and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep. hither and thither, hither and thither, and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. ‘Heavenly God,’ cried Stephen’s soul in an outburst of profane joy.’”

That experience formed the beating core of all of Joyce’s thinking and his later works. Literature, for him, would be about beauty.

I remembered that paragraph and assorted books the evening an English literature student in my college dorm approached the nook where I’d been sitting, reciting quietly to myself the prologue to “The Canterbury Tales,” in Middle English. To me, it was like rolling gems in my mouth.

“You heard that on a record, right? You heard that on a record!!?” When I told him I had, the fear left him. His shoulders relaxed, and he breathed like a human being again.

“Whew,” he said, and walked away with his usual strut.

What struck me was the guy’s naked fear. He’d been terrified that the high status he imagined he had as a world champion title and quote dropper would be undone because someone else might have known something he didn’t know. It seems when he discovered that I’d first heard what our language sounded like in Chaucer’s day on a recording, that cheapened my experience, and he felt his endangered crown settle once more on his head.

For him, the whole shebang was about ego.

I’ve always thought the joy one gets out of art should never be about accumulating quotes to build yourself up, or to impress the girls. When we are handling the accumulated wisdom, experience and gifts of the human animal, we should learn from it, let it all sink in, and summon it for guidance at the twisty bends and curves of our lives.

You may well object: “Yes, but we know so much more than those old guys did.” To which I would reply, “Yes, and they are what we know.”

So, have a little respect for the masters.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.