Flash Lit: Footprints in the Sand

Robinson Crusoe is one of the worst books I’ve ever read to the end, and it took more than two tries to get through.  It’s an adventure, they said.  It’s a classic!  Characters in other books were inspired by it; once, in a Wilkie Collins novel, I think, a character used it instead of the Bible as his touchstone text.  Which was a clever idea, really, and shed a lot of light on the way even the worst book can be a gospel to someone.

And the book gets worse over time.  The first time I tried to read it, I was about nine and I gave up about halfway through.  Crusoe hadn’t made it to the island yet.  He was still whining about how he really should have listened to his father.  That didn’t seem like much of an adventure to me.  Another time I made it to a part where he shoots a bunch of wild animals.  I remember something about a goat or goats after the arrival on the island.  He’s alone in the world and he finds it a purgatorial experience.

Then he finds a footprint in the sand.

He’s not the only human in his newly-circumscribed world.  Someone else is there, shaping it, imprinting it.

Even after all his tribulations, all his wrong choices, Crusoe remains stuck to the idea that he knows best.  He reacts both with joy and fear to the opportunity of human contact, but, sadly, fear wins out.  Friday has to be plugged into Crusoe’s existing paradigm, renamed, tamed, mastered.

Sure, it’s a book of its time.  Expecting it not to be is foolish.  But perhaps the time has come for the tide to come in.