“Where I Learned How to Read” by Salvatore Scibona was
published from The New Yorker on June 13th & 20th 2011. It describes
Scibona’s journey to find his intellectual home. He speaks of his struggles
in school and how often he fails his classes.
Whenever the author wanted to get away from the madness that
surrounds him from his environment, he would spend the night in a
derelict shed and read. He called it“Back-yard Rehab”. He spent the
entire night in the derelict shed reading all types of books like “Out of
Africa” by Karen Blixen, Donald Trump’s autobiography, Kierkegaard,
“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman.
Reading made Salvatore Scibona happy. He copied the first paragraph
of Anne Dillard’s An American Childhood on his bedroom wall. That book
was gifted to him by a teacher who flunked him. In his senior year in high
school, he was received a brochure of St. Johns College. After reading it,
he was intrigued by the curriculum the college offered. He became
determined to make St. Johns his new home. In this new home he would
read more books than ever before and fell in love with it in the process.
Salvatore said, “I carried bricks and mortar to rooftops during the
summers, but if I hadn’t made time to read the night before, my legs
wore out by noon. Even my body needed to read.” Reading in a sense
was one of Scibona’s intellectual homes. While, attending St. Johns, he
made friends that love reading as much as him and turned St. Johns into
his intellectual home. “In retrospect, I was a sad little boy and a
standard-issue, shiftless, egotistical, dejected teen-ager. Everything was
going to hell, and then these strangers let me come to their school and
showed me how to read. All things considered, every year since has been
a more intense and enigmatic joy”