The first title in that section of free, well produced audio classics was a dramatic reading of Treasure Island. I started listening to this text in that fashion and found that I was not confident what was original text and what was adapted dialogue to fill in the wholes of narration with added bits of dialogue and wanted my impression of the text to be that of Stevenson’s words for purity sake in remembering this work so I found a delightful reading on the Libravox app for free as well. I listened to this book in almost one day of manual labor work and was enraptured by this very delightful book.
As I was listening to this book, I was constantly waiting for something of a distinctly sort of literary fiction level literary merit to happen and to my ears, nothing ever did. This book feels to me like a straight forward sort of adventure story that is just so sturdily and craftily told. There are moments that stand out for me in a way that I will remember forever, so moments because I was working outside and it was very hot that I might have captured perfectly in my mind which was helpful that there was not so very intricate things going on in this work. I will remember the feeling of sort of helpless, distinctly human struggle that Jim feels when they are hidden from the pirates in his hometown, hiding out with his mom under a bridge in view of their tavern. There is smallness of approach that is almost horror adjacent here, then also, being on the beach and I don’t remember the struggle of the moment so much as there is the sense that if both parties started for a certain resource at the same time, just be human limitations they would arrive at the same time and it is this feeling of being deeply embodied in a text, you can feel in your feet how hard sand is to traverse, how both parties are bound by these immutable laws of strength and speed which no matter how fast or slow some individual is to the other are only marginal differences and when the game of life and death is involved you’d want to be sure of your advantage, and the game of wits intercedes as there is more play in those lines.
The other moment that I will remember which may be the most clever circumstance in the book is when Jim makes it back to the ship adrift under the steerage of the mutineers, he dispatches the character, Israel Hands (perhaps the most villainous character in the book short of the first pirate Jim meets in England, Blind Pew) which is where we get the famous image of the pirate with the knife in his teeth, and then Long John Silver makes it back to the ship as well and they are in a duel of wits against one another and then align themselves together to try to outwit the other mutineers lead by Tom Morgan. So the story at present there is, Long John Silver mutinied against the Jim Hawkins contingent and led Tom Morgan and crew against Captain Smollet, Hawkins is going back to the ship to see if he can talk Morgan into joining back up with Smollet against Silver because Silver’s faction is fading. Silver goes back to the ship to shore up his men’s morale, knowing of Hawkins plan, Morgan decides to mutiny against Silver now creating a third faction in the occasion, and Silver has to talk his own mutineers against a second mutiny aided by Hawkins, and it is a fantastically created circumstance of which I loved dearly. This is the moment this book because a classic to me, and a moment I will remember forever as if something like this had taken place on the earth.
Just after finishing Treasure Island, I talked with my go-to two Scottish friends about this eternal question we have amongst ourselves that I will revisit in the Lanark blog entry, but the question is, why is the cardinal sin of Scotland, "showing off". Given this inclination then, Stevenson has to be one of the most famous Scottish people who has ever lived. They named a huge fast food restaurant, Long John Silver's, after the book. Given this then you might imagine that the Scots would take great pride in Stevenson, though you might not ever let the principle person do so in their life time. I ask the Scots if they knew that Stevenson was Scottish and it seemed like a vague memory to them and this is exactly my deep confusion with these people.
I realized after finishing Treasure Island so quickly that I might need another plan. I went back to the Audible premium free classics list and saw the next entry as 1984 by George Orwell, and then after that Pride and Prejudice by Austen and thought that if I kept going in this direction that I might burn through some of the more user friendly classics early in this very long project and thought better than to use up this list so quickly. I decided that I might just run the RNG one more time and see what would happen, and the very next time I pulled it I pulled War and Peace from Tolstoy which will now give me a lot more material to work through this summer as that audiobook, also free on Audible, is 61 hours long, not 6 like Treasure Island.
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