Master of All I Survey

by

Paul Clark

This is a story of what happens when you combine a traditional Catholic upbringing with a gullible child who is also an early reader. It is also a story about memory, how memory is so important when you want to tell a story, but how unreliable it is when you want to tell the truth.

Among the many volumes of family photographs in my parents’ house is one of me when I was about three, sitting on the couch, with a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia on my lap. I was an early reader, though not that early. At age three, I could at best pantomime reading. But by the time I entered kindergarten a couple of years later, I was voraciously reading whatever books whose words I could figure out, and struggling with figuring out the words in books that were still beyond me.

Two of the books that I remember spending a lot of time with at this age were the family Bible and a book on astronomy. Both books had many pictures and most of the words in each book were beyond my understanding.

The Bible's pictures came in two clumps—one in the middle of the Old Testament and one in the middle the New Testament. The pictures were all paintings; I suppose reproductions of the great masters. The Bible also was one of those where the words of Jesus were in red text.

From a visual standpoint, the book was fascinating—all those pictures of the cinematic Old Testament moments (Daniel in the lion’s den comes to mind), and then later in the book this small pocket of words in red. In the front of the book there was an abbreviated family tree. It was something my parents received when they were married, so it had information about their parents and my aunts and uncles, but mainly it had information about my brothers and sisters. There nine of us, so there was a lot of information to keep track of in just a few pages—birthdays, baptism days, first communion, confirmation, etc.

From a tactile standpoint, the family Bible it was unlike any other book in the house. It had a leatherette cover, with embossed gold lettering and a crucifix. Each book of the Bible was tabbed—as I looked at the pictures I would run my fingers up and down the tabs like Jacob running up and down the rungs of his ladder (another one of the pictures). The book was bigger than most of the other books in the house—not quite as big as the family dictionary, but the dictionary didn’t have any color pictures, and I was still a few years away from sitting with the dictionary on my lap and reading it like a novel.

We had to treat the family Bible with more reverence than any other book in the house. Catholic children are trained from early on that if they dropped a Bible, they had to quickly pick it up and kiss it. We didn’t have a special stand for the Bible—I remember it resting on one of the shelves where my dad kept his hi-fi and then stereo equipment. Since it was heavier than most other books, my parents told us that we always had to pick it up with two hands and walk very slowly with it.

Finally, the Bible had all those great stories in the first part of the book, then a Real Important Story in the middle, then the boring part (from Acts to just before Revelations) and then Revelations . . . which seemed to be a story again, but who knew what was happening. And here’s the first place where my memory threatens to get in the way of a good story. Because at the time I was first paging through the Bible, I’m sure I wasn’t really reading. It was likely that either my mom or dad were nearby and I asked them questions about the pictures and they would fill in the back story where my imagination had faltered.  

Then there was the astronomy book which, as I remember, featured drawings of what astronomical events might have appeared like during prehistoric times and then in different points during history. There were only a couple of photos in this book, grainy shots of the moon and pinpoints of light that were Mars or Venus.  The book illustrated a short discussion of the Big Bang with a cluster of white stars. There was a picture of a clan of cave people looking up in astonishment as a meteor streaked across the night sky. The last picture in the book was of something called “Planet X” which stood in for anything that astronomers circa 1960 hadn’t discovered yet in the universe. I dreamed about this Planet X, which was a murky dark orb in this book. I dreamed that there was a five-year-old boy on Planet X who was reading a book that included a murky picture of a planet beyond the edges of Planet X’s universe.

What I couldn't put together in my mind was the connection between the stories told in the Bible and the stories of the planets in the astronomy book. My kindergarten-aged brain tried to figure out the connections, and the best I could come up with was that all the things in the Bible happened—Creation, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul and his boring letters, and then the cataclysm of Revelation—and only after Revelation ended did the stuff in the astronomy book start—stars forming, dinosaurs, meteor showers, cavemen, Greek and Roman Empires, etc.

Since I attended a Catholic grade school after kindergarten, there was nothing in my education that changed my thoughts about this. The nuns didn’t spend any time on ancient civilizations. The Catholic education of the 1960s didn’t spend too much time with the Bible, either, especially the Old Testament. Much of the religious education I remember was memorizing pages of the Baltimore Catechism, in preparation for confirmation, which wasn’t going to happen until 6th grade. My religious education wasn’t one of stories, but of learning rules and learning the consequences of not following the rules.

Somewhere along the line I, of course, figured out that the events in the astronomy book didn’t occur in a separate time frame as the events in the Bible. This connection wasn’t obvious until I was in high school. I was still attending a Catholic school, but now I had moved on from nuns to priests and, more common, lay teachers. The first teacher I had in my first freshman class taught world history. The first thing we read was the Epic of Gilgamesh. My fog of unknowing was blown away in this class. There were many creation tales, I learned. There was more than one Great Flood tale. There were civilizations that preceded the tales told in the Old Testament. When we finally read some excerpts from the histories of Josephus, the last vestiges of my ignorance fell away—people who had nothing but an historical interest in the life of a prophet and his run-in with the Roman leadership also had reported on at least some of the tales of the New Testament.

For a long time I wouldn’t admit to my childish ignorance that lasted long after I should have put childhood things away. Our learning, however, is not a perfect learning—we can never grasp the whole of a thing at once. First impressions die hard, whether they were right or wrong. My decade-long belief that the early history of the world existed in two planes—one told in the Bible, the other told in a child’s first book of astronomy—has actually served me well in my later years. Politicians, journalists, and scientists have a hard time swaying me with their arguments that there is only one right way to think, because I remember a time when I could carry two versions of the beginning of the world in my head—and both of them were right.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it