I have far exceeded the Biblical span of three score years and ten, so I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be most carefully husbanded.
One thing this means is that I simply cannot read as indiscriminately as I did when I was younger. Long gone are those days which seemed without an end when I read all those Charles Dickens 900 page blockbusters like The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and Nicholas Nickleby. Long gone those days when I happily found the life-space to read Edward Gibbon’s immense and magnificent Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Marcel Proust’s multi-volumed Remembrance of Things Past and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and James Joyce’s marvellously mind-opening Ulysses.
Never again will I read a book as long as Edgar Mittelholzer’s vast and fascinating Kaywana trilogy as I did when life went on forever. (And, by the way, what a sadness for young Guyanese that that sprawling masterpiece is no
