Having long outlived the Biblical span of three score years and ten, I realise more and more clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be very 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 are 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 marvelously mind-opening Ulysses.
Never again will I read a work 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 sprawling masterpiece is no longer easily available. In a well-ordered Guyanese universe, Mittelholzer’s novels would never be out of print.
