Counting Down the Days

June 2: A Book

It took me a long time to realize that certain books were not set in modern times. Take, for instance, The Wind in the Willows—the audiobook of which put me to sleep for many years starting at a young age. During those years I came to know everything about the book. I learned which chapters were exciting and which were bizarre. I memorized the lilts and idiosyncrasies of the narrator's voice. With every listen the book wore a groove into my memory. To this day I re-listen to it every so often, and every time it is exactly the same; The shapes of the voices, characters, and adventures slip easily into their places in my mind.

In other words, I was accustomed to everything about the book, and that was all there was to it. So imagine my surprise when, some years ago, I was researching early twentieth century novels, and The Wind in the Willows appeared on the list! I had vaguely known before that it was written many years ago, but looking at the digits 1-9-0-8 made it seem so much more ancient and mysterious than it ever had been before. And yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it made sense for the book to be so old. Why else would a rich, eccentric toad be obsessed with "motorcars?" Why else would the currency used be that of crowns and shillings and guineas, rather than pounds and pence?

Once I realized how old the book truly was, I felt rather foolish. Perhaps it was the anthropomorphic animals that disguised its antiquity, perhaps it was the fact that the toad freely interacted with humans and no-one batted an eye. I don't know exactly what it was, but before that moment I had never considered any of these aspects of the novel strange or out of the ordinary. Of course the town jail was a medieval dungeon. Of course there were horse-drawn barges and Gypsy caravans. It is almost as if, rather than existing in time, the world of the story existed in another material plane, simultaneously contemporary and Edwardian. In that world, the rules were different, and I therefore had no need to worry about something so inconsequential as time.

The Wind in the Willows is part of my childhood. It is simultaneously an Edwardian classic, and a very modern piece of my existence. The world that I live in has been colored by Toad and Rat and Mole and Badger. My writing, even, is influenced by the quaint style that I am used to hearing. In other words,The Wind in the Willows is just as much a product of when it was written as when it was read.