Reading Is Fundamental One of the sections of Coming Up For Air with which I could identify was about Bowling's time being stationed on the coast of England and assigned to guard essentially nothing. During that time of idleness he discovers books, and has the time for uninterrupted, concentrated, reading.

There were times during my deployments in the service that all I really had to do during downtimes was to read, and I did. Unfortunately, it wasn't a time like Bowling's, as I had actual duties to perform, but when one is in the field and there's nothing to do after one's 12-16-hour workday, and there's no access to beer, reading was for me the only activity. Provided, of course, that I wasn't out in the field with the MPs or grunts, in which case reading was difficult to impossible because of the requirements of "light discipline" (not discipline with a light touch, but discipline in the use of light).

It was when I went to work for my family that I got a lot of reading in. This was because, whenever I was not assigned to work which required me to move between several different places, or the work was unsupervised, I would go hide and read. I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. Now years have passed, so my shame is mixed with some amusement at the irony of having used those hours of assiduously avoided labor to read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and listen to right-wing talk radio with its praise of the value of salt-of-the-earth disciplined hard work.

But leaving my hypocrisy aside, there was something magical about those hours. Unlike Bowling, I read under the threat of discovery all of the time. And paradoxically that made me concentrate more, I think, on what I was reading than less. If I felt I might have an hour without interruption, I would read as if reading itself were a criminal enterprise, concentrating as if I were trying to hear the tumblers on a bank safe I was trying to crack. It's too bad that I used many of those hours on Ayn Rand, but I was in my mid-twenties, so I beg forgiveness. Rush Limbaugh did me more good on balance than Rand probably did-though reading Rand was important in that it gave me a picture of libertarian utopia, so it helped to temper my temperament, especially once I began to understand modern (American) conservative thought.

I wish I could say that I used those hours to read the greeks, plus Hayek, Burke, Chesterton, Friedman, and the rest, but I didn't. Instead I read biographies of people like Churchill and MacArthur, along with quite a few novels. My thinking has been shaped much more by reading those who have read the "primary sources", rather than by having read those sources myself. This has been more useful to me than having read the primary sources, as a) it would've taken me so much longer to build up a familiarity with the ideas of Hayek, et al, if I had read them on my own; and more painfully b) I really doubt that on my own I would have understood their arguments and the importance and implications of them. Can I personally get more out of reading Hayek than reading Sowell on Hayek? Probably not, but I will eventually give The Road To Serfdom a try, since I own it and I'd like to be able to say I read it-along with Das Kapital. At first blush reading them after reading so much analysis of them strikes me as cheating, but upon reflection I realize that I'm simply taking the equivalent of a very protracted (and, I hope, good) college class in political philosophy and economics for the innumerate.

That is one of the prices paid by the auto-didact. A formal education on these topics would have saved me time in that I could have (or not) crammed much of the information I've picked up over the years into a semester or two (which is the point of college, generally speaking). But it wouldn't have done this for me, and that's why I did not graduate from college. Now I think I could keep up, as it interests me, but I can't say that the seventeen-year-old version of me could. I'm not smart enough to really learn something if I'm not interested in it (and even then it's dodgy). When I went to college I was a vocal music major, then after a semester I was a political science major, but the latter was all on paper. It sounded better to me than being a sociology or english major-and with less reading than the english major required. After a semester during which I went to about a week of classes as the start of the semester and then no more, I was asked not to return. The big problem was that I didn't want to do any work, so I didn't go to class. The ostrich method of college was my technique, and it worked: soon I didn't have to go to college at all.

After that came time working for the family business (dreadful), a tour in the USMC (pretty good), more time working for the family business (soul killing, except for the reading), and then a move and change of career (pretty good). Things are so much better now than in my "young Bowling days", but I wish sometimes that I could have back those hours of focus. Though I realize (since I'm conservative) that life changes and some things do not come back.  ¶ 11:13