Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped

I was a very sickly child. Lots of days spent wearing a red felt vest with prest studs to ward off the spectre of possible TB. It wasn't TB but I remember the daily exercises I was given to do in order to drain my lungs and in the midst of the school days missed there was a magical friend whose genius seemed to reshape every daily detail into something special and fated. I felt I had a secret correspondence with Treasure Island's creator and Robert Louis Stevenson with his bursting creativity and weak chest! He stood side by side me during my childhood and then went away until seven years ago he came back and named my tuition site Tusitala- 'teller of tales' in Samoan!

So this morning I started to reread Kidnapped once again and found the resourcefulness and drive for adventure infectious and compelling. And how magically David Balfour gives shape to his experience early in the novel when he reflects:

''As if was, I could find no words, neither black nor white, but handed him the letter...''

Reading is an adventure. Writing can halt us in our tracks and throw us out of tired complacency into the new; just as Keats so memorably said in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, we can be 'teas'd out of thought'. Here I was struck by the admision that 'I could find no words, neither black nor white' and this resonated so vividly! How falsely we sabotage the possibilities of possibility through binary oppositions which masquerade as choice. We see nothing other than this or that, hemming ourselves into cul-de-sacs of disappointment when actually there are far far more shades than just the choice between 'black' or 'white'.

The adventure from Tusitala aka Robert Louis Stevenson is that words can captivate and liberate. ..'From time to time his eyes came coasting round to me...'Here is cunning, here is transgression and perhaps criminality and yet here perhaps is the rugged, evasive geography too of an individual whose response to his time is his won.

Kidnapped indeed!