This week, I had a change of heart. My initial reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was that it was tedious and very difficult to get through, despite its simplistic structure. However, I think this was partly due to my lack of knowledge about the Bible. It was hard work, as an ignorant reader, to recognise the parables and the huge number of references as they were being told. Nevertheless, John Bunyan has produced an incredible text that would surely be rewarding if you recognised more than the majority of biblical references. I will one day re-read The Pilgrim’s Progress, after I have read the Bible to see if it is more satisfying.
One aspect I did enjoy, in terms of popular culture, were finding phrases like Vanity Fair and Worldly-Wise appearing in The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is incredible to think that words we almost take for granted had to have an origin somewhere. For my dissertation, I am writing a collection of poetry based on the life of mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing. Additionally, I am developing my own digital humanities resource. Therefore, the opportunity to explore the Reading Experience Database was fascinating. I will certainly be using this in the future to look for new avenues of research.
It was during this exploration of the database, that I happened upon a happy coincidence.
As I’ve been reading a copious amount about Alan Turing recently, I decided to try and find out what he had been reading. Of the three records that appeared, it seemed almost unbelievable that Alan Turing is documented to have read The Pilgrim’s Progress as well as: Reading Without Tears and Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know.
Alan’s extraordinary experience of The Pilgrim’s Progress was as follows: “The only books he had were little nature study notebooks, supplemented by his mother reading The Pilgrim’s Progress aloud. Once she cheated by leaving out a long theological dissertation, but that made him very cross. “You spoil the whole thing” he shouted, and ran up to his bedroom”. – Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, (London, 1983), p. 9, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=31265, accessed: 03 February 2017
As a result of this research, I have decided to work on a series of poems titled respectively after the three books on record. I have included a first draft of one of these below. It is based on the death of Turing’s childhood friend, Christopher Morcam, with whom Alan enjoyed academic argument and astronomy.
Reading Without Tears
At sundown before Saint Valentine’s Day a boy
extended out the tether of friendship and yet
died from complications of bovine tuberculosis.
I am sure I could not have found anywhere
another companion so brilliant and yet
so charming and unconceited.
We journeyed to Cambridge to try for Trinity
I was unsuccessful but he was not and yet
I went and he did not.
I wrote his mother to ask for a photograph
so that I might remember him and yet
found I did not need it.
I looked over the glass ball stuck round
with paper to mark the stars and yet
couldn’t trace them all alone.
On the hockey field I watched the daisies grow
under the warmth of sun and yet
wait to spread their petals wide.
My own mother will write to your own
send flowers for the funeral and yet
she will not quite understand why.
At sunrise on Saint Valentine’s Day a boy
heard his footsteps fall heavier and yet
he will not quite understand why.
Bethany Ashley