July 3, 2006
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Dance of the Numbers
continuedFor Tom Stoppard on his birthday:
“For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it,
there was wont to lie in my mother’s parlour (I know not by what
accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of
devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened
to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the
knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found
everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all
this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the
numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve
years old, and was thus made a poet.”
