Origins of an Iconoclast, Part 1

iconoclast \Icon"oclast, n. 1. A breaker or destroyer of images or idols; a determined enemy of idol worship. 2. One who exposes or destroys shams; one who attacks cherished beliefs; a radical.

That is what I do very nearly every waking hour. I read. I read when I eat, I read myself to sleep, I read when I work. I get paid to read and write. I get paid for things I've read and learned.

Reading fascinates me. Reading has changed the very way human minds operate, but that's fodder for another post.

My mother taught me how to read long before I started school. That has proved to be the single most important factor in making me the man I am today.

I read on a seventh grade level in the first grade. The nuns accused me of cheating, and made me retake the test in the principal's office, while three of them watched.

They took out a dictionary, and started asking me words at random. I knew the largest part of them.

My mom would spank me when she'd come into the room late at night and find me reading under the covers with a flashlight.

In third grade, I maxed the test. I was reading at the college freshman level. Twelfth year, ninth month, on the Iowa Standard Reading Test.

I read a set of children's encyclopedias from A-Z, then read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. Webster's.

The Black Stallion, Connecticut Yankee, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the newspaper, Reader's Digest, Buick repair manuals, the Sears Catalog, the Bobbsey Twins, Field & Stream, Robinson Crusoe, everything I could get my hands on, to include the stag magazines my father hid under the mattress.

Mom wouldn't let me read at the table, sometimes, so I'd read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle, on the sly, and try to figure out how to pronounce all those chemicals.

I spent my summers at the public library, with the family collie shepherding this little, bespectacled runt of a boy through downtown Kansas City. He'd wait on the steps for me to emerge hours later with a load of books to balance on his back, as we walked the half mile back home.

In school, I'd sit bored and read ahead in my history, science, and literature books, and have them all read after the first month or two of the school year. So I'd read them again, or daydream, or read paperbacks I'd smuggled from home.

Oh, I'd do other things, too. I had brothers; we roughhoused and played ball. I was on the swim team.

But by and large, most of my childhood was spent happily lost between the pages of a book.

I read a sci-fi book about a gigantic computer called the Final Encyclopedia. An artificial moonlet the size of Texas, it was constructed with all the wealth of the industrialized world, and was available only to the elite in the fields of science and academia. It contained all of human knowledge. I used to daydream of being able to sit there, to read and learn. I never thought that it would happen in my time.

But, of course, it has. We have the Internet. It didn't happen the way that author had envisioned it, but it is today a reality. The world of knowledge at your desk, for twenty bucks a month. This is the best of times.

In the sixth grade, now in Texas, they put us on those speed reading machines. There I discovered that you can only speak about 350 words a minute. The machine went up to around five or six hundred, I don't exactly recall, but I maxed it out, too.

All of human history, war, religious movements, jihads, revolution, art, life, death … What The Fuck?

What is worthy of the doing? We spend only a few short years in this quickened state, before we get recycled back into Terra?

So the responsibility falls upon the woefully inadequate, and you have me.

I had a voracious appetite for reading as a child also. I also had thick glasses. But I got them when I was two, before I started to read. So, if that is any vindication on your "reading under the blanket" behalf, I'm happy to provide the evidence.

I was very choosy about what I liked to read. Textbooks were never among them, and I envy your affinity to them. I prefer to gather "dry" knowledge through discussion.

Just an aside, did you ever notice how text writers can make even history, perhaps the most fascinating topic in all areas of learning, seem breathtakingly boring?

I think it's hilarious that the nuns immediately concluded you were cheating, and you had to prove you weren't. "Guilty until proven innocent," such an underlying theme of Catholicism, and Christianity (reference "original sin" -- you sucked the moment you were born, now spend your whole life making up for it).

I like how you summed up the torment of broadening horizons in three letters, "WTF?" Exactly.

Every time I forget the obvious, and start putting on airs about being a member of the human race in a civilized society, I make the mistake of turning on the news and am reminded that we are nothing but egocentric animals. To think otherwise is just placing ourselves (mules) in horses' harnesses.

Anyway, I'm growing very self-conscious of my punctuations, so I will close this comment. I hope you have the power to delete on this blog comment thing.