2014 Meditation on Reading

It’s awfully tempting to state that reading makes life worth living.

But that can’t be right. I can think immediately of other activities that give greater, deeper pleasure than a book: an excellent meal, a conversation with an old friend, lovemaking, seeing a beautiful, wild place for the first time, or returning to one filled with memories from long ago.

Yet I’ve spent far more time in my life reading than engaging in -- or even pursuing -- any of those other activities.

So what’s the difference? Perhaps reading is more dependable. Those other peak experiences may be more intense, may deliver more … but they rarely last as long. You can’t keep up a great dinner, a conversation, or an intimate encounter for hours on end, the way you can enjoy a good book.

Those other experiences may also fall flat despite your investment of time and energy. And when that happens, you can’t just lay them aside and pick up another, more rewarding activity the way you may substitute one book for another, in only a moment (if you’re prepared; and what serious reader is not?).

My suspicion is that I read to get away from myself … in order to become more myself.

Reading takes me out of my daily concerns, routines, responsibilities, and anxieties. Much as I appreciate my own company and enjoy my life, I also like to step out of it on a regular basis -- because ultimately, it will end. I am mortal, and someday I’ll no longer be around to talk, breathe, act, sing, run, dance … and read. I don’t like to be reminded of that, and reading allows me to forget it for a while.

Still, it’s not purely an escape. Good and bad, books allude to death. But you get to experience it “slantwise.” You observe from the sidelines; you’re not involved, not implicated any more than you wish to be. With books (as with television and movies), death is a spectator sport, not a participatory one.

I hear that some people read books purely to escape. I gather that’s how many fans treat action thrillers, Westerns, romance novels, science fantasy, and other genre fiction. Still, just as a good book can be read “badly” (that is, with little or no appreciation for its wisdom and depth, as happens when classics and great new novels are attacked for impiety or over-frankness), I suppose a “bad” book can be read well. By that I mean a thoughtful reader can generate self-reflection, see the world in a new light, and become a better person after reading a trashy throwaway.

Ideally, books should treated and experienced like life itself: We travel away from home -- from familiar places and people -- to have experiences we would not have had otherwise, or even imagined … and come out the other side more like the person we were meant to be. The person we ought to be.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche (gently) sneers that we only read (or maybe he means “understand”) what we already know. At the other end of the spectrum, Kafka says a book should “wound and stab us”; it should “wake us up with a blow on the head….” He concludes: “A book should be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” (These quotes are from a letter that 20-year-old Kafka wrote to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak on Jan. 27, 1904.) Much as I love books, and as many as I’ve read -- more than hundred every year for more than 40 years -- I can’t remember a book ever having that effect on me.

We all come down somewhere between Nietzsche and Kafka, I suppose. But ideally, the escape that books provide should also end up making us better people out in the real world. As the passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the final of the Four Quartets, puts it:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I first encountered this passage nearly four decades ago, at the age of 16, in the early pages of John Fowles’s enthralling and maddening novel The Magus. Six years later I wrote an undergraduate honors thesis about that book. I’ve since run across other references to the Eliot passage in literature, art, and rock ’n’ roll.

No doubt as I march haltingly toward death, I will continue to escape from knowledge of it, and toward understanding of it, in the hope of knowing the place I have been, all along, for the first time.


[In a day or two I’ll post a summation of the most memorable things I read last year, and the entire list.]