A Reader on Reading

Though I believe in the obvious usefulness of a virtual library, I’m not a user of e-books, those modern incarnations of the Assyrian tablets, nor of the Lilliputian iPods, nor the nostalgic Game Boys. I believe, as Ray Bradbury put it, that “the Internet is a big distraction.” I’m accustomed to the space of a page and the solid flesh of paper and ink. I made therefore a mental inventory of the books piled by my bed at home. I discarded recent fiction (too risky because yet unproven), biographies (too crowded under my circumstances: hooked to a tangle of drips, I found other people’s presence in my room annoying), scientific essays and detective novels (too cerebral: much as I’d recently been enjoying the Darwinian renaissance and rereading classic crime stories, I felt that a detailed account of selfish genes and the criminal mind would not be the right medicine). I toyed with the idea of startling the nurses with Kierkegaard’s Pain and Suffering: The Sickness unto Death. But no: what I wanted was the equivalent of comfort food, something I had once enjoyed and could repeatedly and effortlessly revisit, something that could be read for pleasure alone but that would, at the same time, keep my brain alight and humming. I asked my partner to bring me my two volumes of Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Lars Gustafsson, in his moving novel Death of a Beekeeper, has his narrator, Lars Lennart Westin, who is dying of cancer, make a list of art forms according to their level of difficulty. Foremost are the erotic arts, followed by music, poetry, drama, and pyrotechnics, and ending with the arts of building fountains, fencing, and artillery. But one art form cannot be fitted in: the art of bearing pain. “We are therefore dealing with a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high,” says Westin, “that no one exists who can practice it.” Westin, perhaps, had not read Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, I discovered with relief, the perfect choice for bearing pain. Opening it almost anywhere while waiting to be prodded and pinched and drugged, I found that the friendly voice of the erudite Spanish soldier comforted me with its reassurance that all would be well in the end. Because ever since my adolescence I’ve kept going back to Don Quixote, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped up by the prodigious surprises of its plot. And since Don Quixote is a book that can be read just for the pleasure of its invention, simply for the sake of the story, without any obligation of studiously analyzing its conundrums and rhetorical digressions, I could allow myself to drift peacefully away in the narrative flow, following the noble knight and his faithful Sancho. To my first high school reading of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have, over the years, added many other readings, in all sorts of places and all sorts of moods. I read Don Quixote during my early years in Europe, when the echoes of May 1968 seemed to announce huge changes into something still unnamed and undefined, like the idealized world of chivalry that the honest knight seeks on his quest. I read Don Quixote in the South Pacific, trying to raise a family on an impossibly small budget, feeling a little mad in the alien Polynesian culture, like the poor knight among the aristocrats. I read Don Quixote in Canada, where the country’s multicultural society seemed to me appealingly quixotic in tone and style. To these readings, and many others, I can now add a medicinal Don Quixote, both as a balm and a consolation.

None of these Don Quixotes can be found, of course, in any library, except in the one kept by my diminishing memory. Karel Capek, in his wonderful book on gardens, says that the art of gardening can be reduced to one rule: you put into it more than you take out. The same can be said of the art of libraries. But the libraries of the material world, however great their hunger, can only hoard existing volumes. We know that every book holds within it all its possible readings, past, present, and future, but its Pythagorean reincarnations, those wonderful forms which depend on readers to come, will not be found on our shelves. Paul Masson, a friend of Colette’s who worked at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, noticed that the vast stocks of the library were defective in Latin and Italian books of the fifteenth century and so began adding invented titles on the official index cards to save, he said, “the catalogue’s prestige.” When Colette naively asked him what was the use of books that didn’t exist, Masson responded indignantly that he couldn’t be expected “to think of everything!” But librarians must, and wishful thinking cannot, unfortunately, be granted room in a seriously run institution.