A Reader on Reading

And the problems of traditional libraries—biased selection and subjective labeling, hierarchical cataloguing and its implied censorship, archival and circulating duties — continue to be, in any society that deems itself literate, essential problems. The library of the mind is haunted by the knowledge of all the books we’ll never read and will therefore never rightfully call ours; the collective memorial libraries are haunted by all the books that never made it into the circle of the librarians’ elect: books rejected, abandoned, restricted, despised, forbidden, unloved, ignored.

Following this pendular motion that rules our intellectual life, one question seems to tick away repeatedly, addressed both to the reader who despairs at the lack of time and to the society of readers who despair at the lack of space: to what purpose do we read? What is the reason for wanting to know more, for reaching towards the ever-retreating horizon of our intellectual exploring? Why collect the booty of such adventures in the vaults of our stone libraries and in our electronic memories? Why do it at all? The question asked by the keen futurologist can be deepened, and rather than wonder, Why is reading coming to an end? (a self-fulfilling assumption), we might ask instead, What is the end of reading?

Perhaps a personal example may help us examine the question.

Two weeks before Christmas 2008, I was told that I needed an urgent operation, so urgent in fact that I had no time to pack. I found myself lying in a pristine emergency room, uncomfortable and anxious, with no books except the one I had been reading that morning, Cees Nooteboom’s delightful In the Dutch Mountains, which I finished in the next few hours. To spend the following fourteen days convalescing in a hospital without any reading material seemed to me a torture too great to bear, so when my partner suggested getting from my library a few books, I seized the opportunity gratefully. But which books did I want?

The author of Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger have taught us that for everything there is a season; likewise, I might add, for every season there is a book. But readers have learned that not just any book is suited to any occasion. Pity the soul who finds itself with the wrong book in the wrong place, like poor Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, whose book bag sank under the ice, so that he was constrained to read, night after freezing night, the only surviving volume: Dr. John Gauden’s indigestible Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Readers know that there are books for reading after lovemaking and books for waiting in the airport lounge, books for the breakfast table and books for the bathroom, books for sleepless nights at home and books for sleepless days in the hospital. No one, not even the best of readers, can fully explain why certain books are right for certain occasions and why others are not. In some ineffable way, like human beings, occasions and books mysteriously agree or clash with one another.

Why, at certain moments in our life, do we choose the companionship of one book over another? The list of titles Oscar Wilde requested in Reading Gaol included Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a French-Italian conversation primer. Alexander the Great went on his campaigns with a copy of Homer’s Iliad. John Lennon’s murderer thought it fit to carry J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when planning to commit his crime. Do astronauts take Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles on their journeys or, on the contrary, do they prefer André Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres? During Mr. Bernard Madoff’s prison sentence, will he demand Dickens’s Little Dorrit to read about how the embezzler Mr. Merdle, unable to bear the shame of being found out, cut his throat with a borrowed razor? Pope Benedict XIII, will he retire to his studiolo in the Castello Sant’Angelo with a copy of Bubu de Montparnasse, by CharlesLouis Philippe, to study how the lack of condoms provoked a syphilis epidemic in nineteenth-century Paris? The practical G. K. Chesterton imagined that if stranded on a desert island he would want to have with him a simple shipbuilding manual; under the same circumstances, the less practical Jules Renard preferred Voltaire’s Candide and Schiller’s Die Räuber.

And I, what books would I choose best to keep me company in my hospital cell?