20131009.0649

Life at Sherwood Cottage has been fairly good to me so far.  The climate has been congenial, the terrain acceptable, and the quality of groceries pretty good (particularly given the prices).  That does not mean, however, that I do not miss anything about living in The City; many aspects of that quintessentially American-urban life (and, really, New York is the US city in popular conception, although there are many others which are better in many respects) are well worth having.  Some of them are even embedded amidst aspects that are, on initial review, quite annoying.

One of those things is the time to read.  I have commented about commuting through The City in the past, and the comments have not always been complimentary.  The smell is not often desirable, and there is some vexation in taking an hour to travel eight or nine miles by subway--walking is nearly as fast, and bicycling every bit as quick, and both avoid delays in the tunnels and reduce the claustrophobic experience of riding what amount to large sardine cans.

Even so, there are benefits.  On even the most crowded rush hour trains, people read.  Some read books, whether novels or textbooks.  Some page through magazines, from National Geographic to Playboy (read for the articles, of course).  The stereotype is of the many-folded newspaper (and it occurs to me that the way newspapers in The City divide their articles makes little sense for a readership expected to read while strap-hanging; the New York Times ought to know better).  Some of the pages are physical, some electronic; some of the pages are "high," as are some of their readers, while others are very much not; but many eyes look over and take in many words on the trains, and there is some benefit in that.

I found a fair bit of it, actually.  I have commented more than once on my journal-reading (including annoying delays in journals getting to me, which does seem to have abated somewhat here); while I lived in The City, I did most of my journal-reading while on the trains.  The marginalia that result show the erratic motion of the train cars' decking under my feet and the benches under my butt when I could get a seat, but some of the best reading I did was while I was jerkily traveling from home to work to dojo to home.  The repeated bursts of reading, intensified through their use as a means to block out much of the surrounding clangor and commotion, improved my work as a scholar in both its aspects (research and teaching).  For that, then, I value the time spent on the trains, even if there are other things that still annoy me in memory.

Sherwood Cottage does not offer me that particular benefit, despite the many others it affords.  My transit, because undertaken by my own efforts, requires my attention--if not quite my full attention, enough that I cannot immerse myself in reading, nor even dip shallowly into it.  For a man whose identity has largely derived from frequency and ease of reading, this is something of a problem--and I have not yet figured out how to resolve it.