THE HAPPIEST READER ?

Who, When, Now?

You think you're happy.

And you are happy : 

That's what you're happy for.

So sang Arthur Lee, the only rock-musician to be celebrated in Parliament. And of course happiness is its own proof & justification as a way of being & knowing.

At least one's own happiness is. For there are few puzzles in life - far more mysterious than the working of the Higgs boson or Wall Street or the Vatican or FIFA - than other people's pleasures. So many times, one must bite one's tongue, itching to say to someone, even a kinsman or friend who is clearly doing something very happily, alone or with others- "You enjoy THAT - really: are you MAD?"

It is the strangest, most unmanageable creature - one's tongue. Sometimes, even when it sees another person enjoy the very thing - person, object or activity - that gives one immense pleasure, it wants to say, and will, if unbitten, "No you're not enjoying that PROPERLY : even if you think you are!". One is pregnant to bursting with the desire to teach - "You CAN'T enjoy until you know the criteria and can make logical comparisons based on those criteria."  Even though our Better-Self knows, as absolutely true, the old saying "Criticism does not replace enjoyment", one is terribly tempted,  and far too often, to say these three soul-annihilating remarks. 

Far, far, rarer is the sensation of admiring wonder at the way someone else enjoys what gives one pleasure. This witness or spectacle produces neither envy nor dismay nor even competition. One is most aware of a quiet acceptance of subordination and an exhilarating gratitude at knowing now how to recalibrate one's own pursuits, with all the time in the world and boundless pleasures waiting. Occasionally one allows oneself pity for others who have yet to observe the transcendently happy person and, more importantly, to be swayed by him/her into a new way of doing. Then, another caution springs instantly to mind. Most deceptive and most doomed is the pointless suffering of condescension: best lashed by  Mephistopheles to Sayers's Faustus:

the red-rimmed eyes

That weep to see how men enjoy their lusts,

Being, so strangely happier than the godly.

So I will weep no more. Only sing the praises of the man who for me is the happiest reader I have ever known: Macaulay.

It is my absolute misfortune to have been, briefly, the unhappiest reader I have known, in life or fiction: a misery that took me to the fatal shore. So I acknowledge the  balancing gift of Fate that, a few weeks after leaving hospital, in 1974, I came across this reader of that reader, Reader.

(I will use book-page images for quotes: to foreground the feel of other books, 20C and 19C)

It is crucial to my argument to record that I was as impressed and delighted, and as benignly envious, of the young Clive James as I was of the elder Macaulay. James is too hard on his Young-Self : forgetting that it was the spontaneous overflow of reading joy, that had to find containment in writing, done privately and with no thought of publication or fame, which connected his spirit to Macaulay. Contrarians will immediately shit all over this. But I reply - If you had a child, whom you avowed publicly that you loved, wouldn't you want for her this intensity of excitement, one of the greatest pleasures of life, even more satisfying than than fame and riches. I further refute the shit-heads by citing the old adage that "love makes poets of us all": for there has never been, and never will be, a person of any religion or creed, who, in the delirious exaltation of first love who doesn't reach for a pen to make words of this avalanche in the heart. Such are the defining uses of literacy. If your reading - of whatever - doesn't want you to make notes sometimes to add to your pleasure, you're not reading properly - is that the word?

Though then  an undergraduate, I had still not attained young Clive's plateau. But the elder Clive did set for me then, and it remains so in my dotage, the line of effort. I will quote this before continuing my eulogy to Macaulay.

The gorge of lazy dilettantes and contrarian bastards surely rises at those phrases "a proper sense of inadequacy" and "appropriately dissatisfied". For decades, I mis-remembered his recommended ratio as -  for every three books you spontaneously choose to read, you read one you "should feel obliged to read.".  But I tried to keep to this lower road, and was always happy with the burden, which never felt punitive or impossible, but only ever a promise of more and more joy, and a promise regularly fulfilled. Alas, I still met very few people on the 1-3 way. 

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THE HAPPY READER AS HERO

Thomas Babington Macaulay was the son of a man, Zachary Macaulay, who did as much, if not more, towards the abolition of slavery, and the amelioration of the emancipated, than Wilberforce, Shaftsbury and Babington. Having the example of such a father, who had also made his lounge a playroom for his children long into their late adolescence, it is not surprising that, after his death, Thomas accepted the responsibility of care for the extended family. To understand the strategy he took, the modern reader must imagine choosing such a job as this: one which requires alighting upon a rocket that takes six months to reach the new place of work: a place, a planet, with a completely different and often dangerous climate and an only intermittently submissive native population. The task is to frame an education system and a penal code. The salary for three or four years work might set you and and your kin at ease, not luxury, for life : but only if your  health - body, mind and soul-  hold in a strange land.  In the space-age, communication is of course is by instant telecoms: but for Macaulay there were only written letters, which again might take six months each way. He did his time in India, accompanied by his beloved sister, and came back.

(My father was born in a tiny village in Imperial India. In his teens, his communist beliefs prompted him to join the Second War of Independence. But before that, he had had the extraordinary good fortune to go to an extraordinarily good government school, which would have had its roots and ethos in Macaulay's Minute. (I deeply regret that the way this Minute has been traduced by left-wingers was the cause of my hesitating to read Macaulay for 43 years. When I finally read it this year, I found it to be well-argued and subtle.) The Urdu and Persian my father learned over three years in that school gave him his highest pleasures in life, surpassing even those of his mother tongue Punjabi. Once, when he was 86, I saw him effortlessly write, like Leonardo, mirror Urdu and Persian. The English he learned there made it easier to progress when he made the fateful decision to migrate to the UK from Independent India. But the element of self-betrayal and compromise in coming to the land of the colonisers left him absolutely conflicted his whole life about the worth of the English language. He left his children different cross-cultural puzzles. It must be recorded that in the preceding centuries neither Hindu, Muslim or Sikh rulers had founded such a Macaulayan state school. Nor have enough been founded in independent India or Pakistan.)

I urge the Reader to scroll up and look again at the book-list that dropped James's jaw : now that s/he is aware of the exact circumstances of such reading and, equally importantly, such extensive writing in margins. It was all and only for pleasure. As well as dazzlingly well-argued Government documents and Parliamentary speeches, Macaulay wrote magnificent essays, many of epic length, on literary and and historical subjects, that sometimes came out in pirated editions in America and the continent before the official versions! But the marginalia were pure private flow. His nephew Otto so loved his uncle that he published a few pages of these.

Back in England, with his family cared for, he turned to his life's work of English history. He remained in public service but refused ministerial posts and professorships - which would have brought more riches and some fame - because they would have crimped the hours of his principal pleasures - conversation with his family and with his friends, and reading and writing. He freely gave gifts of money to struggling writers, and other just struggling. That some recipients were ungrateful and discourteous did not make him cynical or stall. (This has reassured me in my own occasional misery as a benefactor.)

Ankle-snapping contrarians again may sneer that he had the time because he had the money to get servants and he had an eidetic memory. They forget how hard all mortals, even the rich, find it to protect their pleasures : some can barely locate a pure desire for any person or any activity which they will pursue to the peace of satisfaction, and so they are forever moving restlessly between compensations and hatreds. One is repeatedly appalled at the realisation that many men & women, of all creeds, who have attained seemingly enviable wealth and power and fame -  politicians, captains of industry, celebrities of all the electronic media -  have these long and and hard won achievements as mere compensations : and that their lives are barren of any real satisfactions. I assert that it is a mortal sin to not protect one's pleasures. It is a truth life will soon show us, that though a person - of your bloodline or not - who protects their own pleasures might attack yours, a person who fails to protect their own pleasures certainly will attack yours. One of the most perfect examples of protection of pleasure is a tiny line in Joyce's Ulysses: "I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown". The speaker is in a pub and about to order: and suddenly becomes aware of experiencing absolute thirst, which given the circumstances - that a drink is immanent - he is also able to enjoy as a rare & unique experience : which finds expression in hyperbolic quantification : (for  contemporary values multiply by 100.) He knows his thirst is priceless because it promises infinite satisfaction. 

An awareness of the difference between technical skills and moral virtues, techne and arete, shines through all Macaulay's actions and writings. Nor is an eidetic memory of much worth unless one has a genuine desire to regularly review on that inner screen of the mind the text. More than my amazement that Empson knew the whole of Othello by heart, was my delight in that reader-writer's absolute delight that shines through his literary criticism :it comes across as more deeply happy than that of Eliot or Leavis. Imagine the leap of extrapolation I had to perform when I read that Macaulay not only had the whole of Paradise Lost by and in heart, he could speak of it with far more delighted sense and invention than the Homeric rhapsodes whom Xenophon mocks for their mere paid parrotry. 

THE CRYING READER

The meaning of tears is perennially problematic. (Almost twenty years ago, I helped organise and spoke at an international conference on this topic.) Flaubert famously said "When I read a sentimental novel, I cry tears of emotion: but when I read Goethe, I cry tears of admiration.". (I first felt the difference in flow watching Russian Ark.) Victorians, we are repeatedly told, were not given to displays of emotional tumult. In our time, after the orchestral recitals by prisoners commissioned by their executioners in Auschwitz,  Burgess suggested that we have different, and usually unconnected, ducts for aesthetic tears and ethical tears. One of my favourite weeping tales was told on tv in the 90s by a roarer of the 60s, whose name is lost to my old memory.

"In the early hours, I found myself wandering in the corridors of large hotel where another endless rock party was in progress. I was drunk, high, well-fucked and utterly empty. Boredom, mischief and spite set me to opening strangers' doors at random. And I saw. I saw, unseen, a half-naked model, her face a teary mess of mascara and bruises, wailing and scrabbling on the floor after pearls that had been unstringed. A much older and much uglier man was repeatedly kicking her, as he said - "Do not have tears for things which do not have tears for you!" I shut the door. That saying kept me going for ten years." 

Macaulay's tears have an exemplary harmony. It is important to show the man both with and without a book in hand. If the following extracts, also from Life and Letters of  Macaulay edited by Otto Trevelyan, his nephew, do not persuade the Reader of this unusual harmony between life and reading, I have one other witness. 

1: Diary :aged 55 :  On his sisters Hannah & Margaret and his niece Margaret.

2 : Nephew Otto's recollection: On kindred Children 

3 : Diary :aged 52 :  On children of the world.

4 : Letter : aged 39 : On his friend, Ellis.

5 : Letter : aged 51 : On Homer

6 :  Diary : aged 49: On not being able to read

It is an important maturational moment when one experiences, for the first time, weeping, not from the shock of newness during a First Reading, but from the awareness of knowledge during an after-First-Reading. One hears one's more logical-Self asking "Why are you blubbering when you know what is going to happen : and so should not feel surprised or dismayed that it will happen?". The only worthwhile answer to this is : "I'm glad I do, for it seems to be a measure of my abiding humanity that I do, at 20, 40, 60. and  80 years of age, for books I first read in my teens.".

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THE FOUR CHAMBERS OF THE HEART'S BOOKS

We all work out that there are different experiences of reading and rereading. Some people try to sort out the differences.

FIRST READING

The First-Reading of a book can happen for many reasons : because one found the book by chance, or even secretly, or it was a gift from a relative or friend or mentor : or because it was a requirement of a course of education or a social group or for work. This reading is temporally, logically, and psychologically the First. It can't be repeated. The experience of  First Reading might have been one of relief, or joy, or release : or to use a different trilogy of affects overlapping with that - of satisfaction or compensation or anhedonia. Even if it was an unhappy experience, that one tries to forget or even evacuate, one continues one's life knowing that no-one will ever be able to say that one has not read that book and should. For some people this is a crucial defence.

What is also possible is that the First Reading weaves what we might best call a cord of communion between the book and one's heart, one's Best-Self, : such that if the connection be snapt one should take to bleeding inwardly. (Proper Readers will smile at this homage to Rochester's words to Jane). Henceforth there will always be the intermittent experience of tugging from within, prompting one to pick up the book again : but never for obligation, duty, commerce, or fame. This sense of attraction can be as powerful as it is mysterious. Consider the spectrum from pre-school child to Cambridge Professor of Literature.

"Read it to me again!" is a command every parent knows at bedtime. The child wants to hear a familiar story for the nth time. And she wants it read exactly, and exactly in the same way - without embellishment or abbreviation or sarcasm or irony and never without affection. What is going on in the child that she wants to keep taking into her head and heart the same story & same Reader-affects? Bettelheim suggested that the child intuits, rather than knows, that this story helps clarify some unconscious desires and anxieties for which the child is yet too young to have words.

But here is a gerontion reader, Kermode, talking about  a new book, Germs by Wollheim.  "This is not a book to be admired for a season or a year, but to be counted among those masterpieces of which the fading memory continually demands return and refreshment."  When I'd first read Germs, I'd immediately thought - I doubt there will be many books this century with as much wisdom expressed in the highest prose-style but I also wondered if I was (again) too easily overcome. Yet the ageing professor's words surpass my praise. What is remarkable is their affinity with the child's experience of pull. Being an adult, he has far words and concepts than the child, and so has (sufficiently) perfect understanding of the book: but the longing for refreshment is a different abiding affect.

The inescapable attraction is, of course, one characteristic of love. 

"If it be love indeed, tell me how much", Cleopatra famously asks Mark Anthony. He is trapped by a mad question he must answer.

How much does this book mean to you: how deeply do you take it to heart? is a little more approachable.

I will delineate four possible heart-depths. I reiterate that these responses, these efforts, are after the First Reading : and they are all suffused by desire and love, but not fear or duty or ambition. (It goes without saying that any of the Readers might be saints or perverts or heroes as well as happy readers.)

1 : RE-READING PLAIN 

One simply wants to read the book again and so one does : start to finish, doing nothing else. One might do this countless times with immense satisfaction. There need be no supplementary attention to literary criticism or biography or history. In fact there might not even be conversation with others.  As different ages & life experiences provide the setting for these re-readings, the book will accrue emotional associations strictly separable from the emotions prompted by the book : but, again, the strictness is not punitive or relevant. 

THE DEEPER RE-READINGS 

If we say that the next three types of desire are stronger than the former, plain re-reading, we mean only logically  and psychologically : different emotions are engaged and different efforts must be made.  The types are separable and might be experienced in different sequences. Again, it is a logical point that the Plain-Re-reading after one Deeper-Rereading-Type will feel different from all earlier Plain Rereadings: and that the Plain-Rereading done after doing all three Deeper-Reading-Types will feel most different. This has very little do with mere cleverness:  but everything to do with emotional commitment and the finding of time for the pleasures.

2 : RE-READING FOR MEMORY

From somewhere deep inside comes a desire to commit the words of the book to memory. When might this happen? It might be felt even during the First Reading, or after the First-Plain-Rereading or the Fifth-Plain-Rereading. But why memorise when you have the physical or digital text? One of the most fundamental human forces is in play: to take in, to keep inside, that which is felt to be a good thing. Unless one is blessed with an eidetic memory, the process of memorising might involve reading aloud or writing out, and self-testing, or all three. The aural experiences of saying the words aloud or saying them in one's head and the hand-eye experiences of writing-out induce other affects which will subsequently always be attached to the book too. Again, I am separating this effort from the related effort of memorising for public performance - family-lounge, dinner-party, pub, amateur show or professional. There are some poems & some lines of prose that I memorised long ago which I have never spoken in company: and which still give me pleasure - smiles and tears too - when I say them aloud in my head or actually aloud. I'm sure the Reader recognises this: at least from learned songs, if not poems and prose. It is a clear sign of damnation to have no such words inside one's heart.  

I hope it is uncontroversial to state that the memorised poem/prose/speech, or even whole-book, is deeper inside the person who has reread-for-memory than it is inside the person who has only done the plain-re-reading. 

3 : REREADING WITH PENCIL : REAL or DIGITAL

Sometimes during the First Re-reading, or even during the very First Reading, an emotion flows through one's heart and mind that is so powerful and so uncontainable, that one stops reading and reaches for a pencil. One feels compelled to mark the text : the word for all these types of mark is marginalia. Mostly. the mark is a mere sign - a line under the words, or a line, or two or three lines or a tick or a cross, in the margin. Occasionally, the mark is a word or phrase or sentence : "Yes!" or "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" or  "Just like Aunt Sally" or "cf: Robinson 1712" or "Gurbakhash is much better!" .Where does such compulsion come from? And I repeat that I am talking about a book that does not have to read for any reason other than private pleasure : and about which no-one else is expecting comment or judgement. The source of the compulsion is not important right now: only the fact that after making the mark one feels calmer and happier, and carries on reading. It is also a fact that such marked texts are treasured more than even brand new or First Editions: for they carry one's autobiography, and the biographies of those dear to one, more deeply.

Two qualifiers need to be added. Those who have read the private diaries and private letters of several famous people will have learned to tell a crucial difference. Some writers seem to have written without self-consciousness, with complete freedom in an absolutely private dialogue with themselves or the single recipient (of the letter) : with no thought of a non-specific audience or publication. But others, it soon becomes clear, have an eye on living fame and/or posterity: the caution and manipulation in the phrase-making and sentences is transparent. Similarly, marginalia might also be infected with falseness and vanity. In a brilliant character sketch, Myles imagines offering a service to dilettantes to produce marginalia in key books in the library that the latter have purchased with his/her mock Georgian pile.

I am mindful of writing in the age of e-readers and digital books which allow a staggering array of marking types -signs, emojis, fonts - all at the touch of the keyboard, or even a spoken direction to Siri. This is no doubt more efficient than the stubby pencil. But I feel that handwriting a deep emotion produces a subtly different calm and pleasure.

4 : REREADING FOR WRITING PERSONAL ARGUMENT

This obviously connects with, but does not always follow, from the marginalia of Rereading with Pencil. It is the slowest as well as the deepest re-reading. It is, again logically, the one which requires the most commitment of time as well as of heart and mind. For the last time, I will say this is a desired-effort not a required-effort : and it might never be shown to another human being. One finds clean paper, or a new notebook, or a new Word-document : and one patiently records not in notes or telegramese but in sentences, made with deep joy, thoughts and feelings about the reread book. There is no demand or restriction of word-count or deadline or house-style. It may be that one has acquired, in one's public life of school or college or paid-work or evening-classes, the skills of exegesis & précis and literary & textual criticism. So there might be a continuity between what one chooses to publish and one's private marginalia and private essay : or there might be a significant and satisfying discontinuity.

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That is my conjecture for thinking about how much reading means to a person in their very core of being. It allows one to ask oneself and to ask other people two questions, completely innocent of intrusion into sexuality or salary or fame :  

What are the books you carry in the first, second, third and fourth chamber of your heart? 

Who is the happiest Reader you have ever known?

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MEMORY RECALLED 

Every boy and girl, man or woman, of whatever society, knows how hard and often miserable is the experience of trying to memorise facts and skills, of mind and body, for exams, local and public and national. They will also recall the bitterness that this effort was often  required during the many weeks of rare sunshine.

It is an observation of anthropology that some human cultures have valorised the group-members who had developed their power of memory to its zenith for their own self-discipline and perhaps also for the pleasure of their fellow group-members. It is an observation of ethics & politics to say that one group is better, more civilized, than another, because it has a greater number of such memory-artists. As with almost every human idea, the first perfect expression of the valorisation of memory and the scepticism of that valorisation, comes with the Ancient Greeks, twenty five centuries ago. (Contemporary sceptical gobshites would do well to recall this historical fact.) 

I doubt - but I am willing and long to be corrected - that there are ten Homeric rhapsodes in contemporary Greece, equal to Niceratus: and nor are there ten men and women alive in England and America who know Paradise Lost  - or any equivalent text - by heart : and even if there were, I doubt there would be an informed audience of a hundred willing to listen to the recital. To twist George Eliot's famous phrase, this, to me, feels like the growing loss-of-good of the world.

Learned skills and their professional execution in public provide one crucial characteristic of a human being, of whatever gender, creed, sexuality or health : thus the question most asked of strangers after saying "Hello!"  is "What do you do?". Two other questions might elicit a deeper characterisation, some might say the real or truer person : "What have you chosen, for pleasure, to learn by heart?" and "What have you chosen, for pleasure, to make written notes on?". Logically and psychologically, a person might also choose to learn by heart the notes he or she has made about a topic or activity: so that when he or she speaks, s/he feels informed rather winging it with flimflam.  As one ages through the decades, one learns that these two questions  are more frightening to most people than intrusive questions about their family or sex lives. And of course, who would dare to say in reply to someone - "You're talking flim flam: you don't know the inner meaning of what you've read"  let alone "Bollocks". 

All skills, of mind and body and both, take time to learn, even reading and literary skills : but pleasure and joy are not automatic. A person with an eidetic memory no more feels automatic pleasure, let alone has automatic skill, than a person with great wealth or perfect health or a large penis or clitoris. The necessary, and usually elusive, additional factor, or blessing, is the permission, encouragement and praise of a Benign Superego : for only this person's presence in one's heart will make the necessary effort, months and years of practise, alone and with others, also generate joy, private and shared, and also induce an understanding of the virtue of that joy. These last sentences merely reprise the truths about the ancient Greek concepts of techne and arete. One of the greatest achievements of any human being is to be the Benign Superego of another. Manipulating, double-binding, or even bullying and vicious parents, teachers, priests and trainers, and supposed friends, may get you medals, money sex and fame : but alas, all these got that way rarely bring life-giving satisfaction. 

THE FALLOWING HEART

The other necessity that the Benign Super-Ego will advise, permit and facilitate is of fallowing, a restorative pause from practise and performance and even repeated pleasures. This is what might be called secular meditation, and so is very different from 'relaxing' with a demented commitment to another activity : it's dismaying how many elite sports men and women who spend downtime in hours of meretricious computer KOBS gaming or online gambling. You can't rush fallowing or pay for it to be done by someone else.

It is the task of philosophers and divines, of whatever faith, to insist on these truths : and also on the dangerous lie of  the capitalist, again of whatever religion, who says "I can sell you this new product I've made. It will make you happier, more quickly and with less effort. You can in fact have two (or more) pleasures simultaneously : yes you can get twice or more the pleasure, you don't have to wait or pause. And I've another product to help you relax and fallow more efficiently. Don't let other people tell you what's good for you!"

The satisfied re-reader is the capitalist's nightmare: every time s/he re-reads a book s/he already has read, a new one remains unsold : and as do other (electronic) devices that might cut into rereading time.

Here is an unusual story from the Industrial Revolution concerning Macaulay's History Vol I.

One is reminded of State-Readers for Cuban cigar-rollers. But the example above implies a choice to spend free time. I ask you reader, can you imagine this happening now, anywhere, with any book? And note again what was being offered and experienced was pleasure. Three years ago, I was part of the set, mostly academic and therapy professionals, chosen to read sequential sections of  "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Freud at the Freud Museum London. It was a great idea poisoned by the now usual stench of the plague of telecom fiddlers : from the lectern one didn't only see attentive listeners but also the modern aspirant renaissance men and women who think they can check and work on three telecom devices and simultaneously take in, enjoy and respect Freud's masterpiece, let alone the living performers.

So, again, even if Macaulay had money and servants and an eidetic memory, we also say again that he refused cabinet positions and professorships, and probably many board positions too - think of Osborne's four jobs and almost countless consultancies - because they would reduce the time and emotional energy available for conversation with family and friends and for reading and writing. 

PERFECT SUBLIMATION

History has not recorded Macaulay's pursuits and achievements in sex and love. It seems that, like Kant, he did not experience these. All, not merely part, of that lifetime of psycho-sexual energy was sublimated. But it is important to note that history has not recorded any residue of bitterness, misanthropy or misogyny. Not only did he treat his kinswomen and female friends with intellectual courtesy and goodwill, he is on record as introducing schools for the daughters of serving soldiers. I'm sure he had some minor human faults.

The two defining qualities of his writing are beautiful rhythms of clauses and philosophical fairness. After reading a passage silently, one feels compelled to read it aloud to oneself for more enjoyment, to feel the words in one's mouth and ear:  and one longs to hear it read to one, as many of his contemporaries did.  Techne might produce the former, even in a mean & vicious personality: but only arete will produce the latter. (One might say that the satisfactions of techne are aesthetical and the satisfactions of arete are ethical : but if Keats is right on truth and beauty, they are hard to separate.) Macaulay is not cheap or spiteful about those with whom he disagrees: nor does he over-defend his heroes. His 80 page essay on Francis Bacon is a masterly example of this: an initially surprising amount of text excoriating Bacon for his shamefully obsequious ambition, his treachery to friends, and his corruption of the law and then a similar fullness in his account of Bacon's worth to humanity for his intellectual prowess and revolutionary empiricism. It is an additional pleasure to find oneself often laughing out loud at a temperate witticism. 

Despite knowing that he had probably read far more than any of his readers, he never tried to get away with flim-flam-fudge in his expositions and explanations. He put in more hours than many other scholars might have done. Of his masterwork, the History of England, Thackeray wrote "Take at hazard any three pages, and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as it were, you, the average reader, see one, two, three, a half score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry with which you are acquainted... He reads twenty books to write a sentence: he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description."  And even higher praise comes from Buckle "On several subjects I should venture to differ from Mr Macaulay.... but [he has] qualities which will long survive the aspersions of his puny detractors, - men who, in point of knowledge and ability, are unworthy to loosen the shoe-latchet of him they foolishly attack." 

AN INTERLUDE BEFORE THE END - THE COMPARATOR

I am now older than Macaulay at his death at 59. His beloved sister, was left to, and had the skills and grace to, edit the material to complete his History. Had he lived, what might he have written, knowing he had already written his life's work? For sure he would have continued to read with great satisfaction into his sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties... But what might have tempted him to pick up his pen? Though I say comparator above, I will not be implying any comparison or judgement in the brief story I now tell about Barbara Reynolds, whom I filmed in an interview in 2007, when she was 93. By the time she'd retired thirty years earlier, she was world renowned as a scholar of Dante, translator and Italian dictionary editor. She had nothing to prove to the world. She said to me, off-camera, something like this: "When I was 89, I found myself wondering - What do I think of Dante now? I resolved to reread the whole of Dante, and then to sketch my thoughts. I didn't have a book contract and, at my age, time and health are  really quite unpredictable. But that's what I did, and how the book came to be written. I thought it was interesting and gave the manuscript to my agent. After almost two years and nine rejections from publishers, I said to him - Try one more and then stop. I didn't mind. The tenth publisher took it. An Italian publisher might bring out an Italian edition, which is very rare for commentary in English." 

Reader, try to imagine her pleasure in that rereading and writing.

A few weeks later, at lunch, I told her of a project of mine. She was encouraging. As I helped her into the taxi taking her home, she turned to me and said with a smile, "Do not be in a hurry Mr Singh". It was spoken in the tone of such a heroic Reader as she was.

THE ANSWERS

Now is not the time for my autobiography, the books in my heart's chambers : but, my answer to the second question "Who is the happiest Reader you have ever known?" is Macaulay. His happiness was so great, and so unusually purified by his other primary happinesses, in family and friends, I was left in smiling awe and moved to write this piece. Even less people read him nowadays than contemporaries of Clive James in 1974 : but that is no slight to him and it is the ignorant Reader's monumental loss. Have a look at what Carlyle, one of his contemporaries and the founder of the London Library,  wrote to Macaulay's nephew: 

How many people does one come across in the decades of real daily life, or in the Republic of Letters, who fill one with "cheerful amazement"? Even that very phrase - and so perfectly expressing my own response - was never seen before. 

A few months ago, on my 64th birthday, I was sat in this room at  Rothley Temple reading Otto's account of his uncle being born there in 1800.