Hungry for the World Read Online Free PDF

every aspect of my life unquestioned. He believed, as his own father had believed, that a child’s love for her parent came only through respect and fear. Stoic and not given to negotiation, my father ruled with the intensity of his eyes and the strength of his hand. Any breach of proscribed conduct was met with immediate punishment, and that punishment was most often a spanking made more agonizing by my being sent to my room to await and think about what I had done. I would lie on my bed wide-eyed, listening for the sound of my father’s footsteps coming down the hallway, the slap of the leather belt in his hands.
    After his conversion, the discipline my father meted out came just as surely and suddenly as it always had, but now my misbehavior displeased both him and the Heavenly Father, whose punishment, I was promised, would be even greater.
    What both my father and my faith demanded of me was complete obedience, the total submission of my will. And it was my will, even at a young age, that I seemed unable to surrender. I learned early on how not to cry when whipped, to let the sting of the hand turn from burn to icy numbness, to let the arm wear itself out trying to draw from me tears. I never learned to give in, make it easier on myself, pretend the chastisement I did not feel. Stubborn, strong-natured, my elders said, and shook their heads in foreboding.
    But it was not so simple. Along with unflagging obedience, there was this other, seemingly contradictory thing that my father required: he wanted me to use my mind. It was my father who taught me to question, who teased me with riddles and word games, asked me to tell him which way the windwas blowing, how many miles we’d traveled at certain speeds, why it was that Christ insisted upon washing the feet of Simon Peter even though it was the disciple’s heart that bore the greater stain.
    From my father I learned to challenge the explication and interpretation of Scripture. He spent hours referencing and cross-referencing various texts. He argued loudly and obstinately with ministers, evangelists, and deacons, taking, I think, his greatest pleasure in the argument itself. Like him, I read from my Bible each day, so that by the time I was in fifth grade, I had memorized any number of begetting lineages, and I knew that
dross
was the imperfection that must be separated from the pure, just as Christ would return to claim His church and leave the sinners behind. It would be years into my adult life before I realized the relative, physical limitations of our holy text: the story of creation and original sin, only a few chapters long, goes on for pages and pages in my mind, so carefully had I been taught to embellish the Garden, the conflict, the Fall.
    Reading was my solitude, my escape from boredom, from my younger brother’s demands to play, from my cousins and their constant bickering. Even after we moved closer to town, into a frame house with interior walls, we were still miles from the nearest television, isolated by the impenetrable barrier of mountains and trees so that the only radio we pulled in were the midnight skips from a station in Texas. I would read not only the Bible but whatever script came into my hands. The club my mother had joined in my name gave me the miracle of books by mail, and I raced my brother home from the bus on days we thought the thick cardboard envelopes might come. Cereal boxes at breakfast, the instructionson cases of motor oil, the trials of Bazooka Joe—I was ravenous for words, for some connection to the outside world. I read the set of
World Book Encyclopedia
and Children’s Classics my parents had purchased when I was in third grade, cover to distant cover.
Robin Hood, Science World, Le Morte d’Arthur, Big Red:
I learned about the universe in which I lived from the pictures and tales, and from the words whose sounds I did not recognize but hoarded like a raven nesting silver. I learned
puma
and
ermine; friar, Excalibur,