Some thoughts on reading...
I have one request of the written work. I demand it shake me. I want to be touched, or even tormented. I want it to connect me, on some strange and fundamental level, back to myself, and, just as importantly, to the world outside myself. And finally I want it to connect me to the work itself.
The best books will stay with you, within you, for as long as you live. That which was borne out of the writer’s interior--if it has been created with any generosity of spirit and with any intention of reaching the reader—should spill into the interstices of the reader’s world as both a real experience and as something infinitely more mysterious, like a kind of haunting, or a shadowy trace of a long since disappeared loved one, or as an opening up of a previously unknown passage into another world.
Reading is a surrender and a defiance of the constraints of time, an entering into an inexplicable intimacy and communion, a pleasure unique in all the world, and an incursion into territory both familiar and not real.
Here is another thing: the reader is anonymous, always blissfully anonymous. The reader, unlike the writer, is not burdened by authorship, responsibility, revelation, or desire. The reader is free. 12/20/2015
The book does not exist without you, the reader:
Without the reader the book does not exist. The reader brings the written work into existence. The book needs the reader in order to become something other than an inanimate object; the book needs the reader in order to become that which it was created to be. The book sits there, waiting for you; you can take it or leave it, hold it in reserve, delay and defer, but it is always there waiting for you, needing you. But then, in a capricious twist, the book is paradoxically unmoved and indifferent to your response once you choose it. It is impervious to your feelings. “I want you; I need you,” it seems to say, “but I don’t care if you love me or not.” We can be moved by it or hate it or feel indifferent, but we leave no mark upon it. Whatever we feel about the book we’ve read, the book is unmoved.
And yet, the reader’s experience denies the book its hermetic seal:
The author writes his or her work in “real” time about a world that exists outside of time as we know it, thereby creating a kind of timelessness. But once the work is complete it is static, and other than the exception brought about due to the mutability of translation, the text in its original language, the actual words, are locked, hermetic. Or so it seems… The reader will take up this timelessness in “real” time at a moment when she is feeling pleasure or sorrow or anger, or any other number of emotions. And we, the reader, will read the book—which may have been written years, decades, or even centuries earlier—when we are young and the world is new to us, or later in life when we are older. We may read the book when we are in the midst of heartbreak, or just after having fallen in love, or at a time when we are older and reassessing our life, fending off regret or loss, or full with our accomplishments. We will read the book over a period of days, or weeks, or months. We might begin the book in Los Angeles and finish it in New York. We may read it while at our desk, or while curled up on a couch, or amidst the din of a commuter train, or on a hot summer day in the shade of a tree. The world before us while we read—the knowledge of the child sleeping in the next room, the look of the cherry blossom tree in full bloom outside our window, the glimpse of a boy and his dog passing on the road as we momentarily look up from this book—becomes superimposed over the landscape and characters and images in the text. This very act of reading makes inevitable the commingling of our life at the time with the author’s story, the writer’s words, the poetry on the page, and this will resonate, in ways both intended and unintended. 6/5/2019
Reading, reading well, requires some dedication and some skill, too.
Can one be a “great reader” the way a writer can be a “great writer”?
Can the reader become more skillful at reading? Can the reader be passionate, driven, incapable of getting through, getting up, going on, without this activity. Can the reader learn to become a more compassionate, generous, and forgiving reader? More generous but also more discerning? Can one become a brilliant reader? I believe the answer to all these questions is yes.
The wonderful gratuitousness of being a good reader:
Reading literary books, unlike writing, produces nothing, results in nothing, has no end product. Is there any other activity that one can do daily, weekly, yearly and become really good at that will produce no tangible return: no garden, no meal, no art object, no product, no financial reward? It appears to be the quintessentially gratuitous act. So what does reading do for us? What does it give to us? What do we get from it? Is it pleasure? Is it distraction? Is it escape? Is it knowledge? Is it collusion with the writer in his or her evasion of death? Is it the communion between writer and reader and story that reaffirms our shared humanity? Is it loss and love threaded together, a suture that leaves a trace and dissolves at the same time?
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