A Reader on Reading

The impoverished mythology of our time seems afraid to go beneath the surface. We distrust profundity, we make fun of dilatory reflection. Images of horror flick across our screens, big or small, but we don’t want them slowed down by commentary: we want to watch Gloucester’s eyes plucked out but not to have to sit through the rest of Lear. One night, some time ago, I was watching television in a hotel room, zapping from channel to channel. Perhaps by chance, every image that held the screen for a few seconds showed someone being killed or beaten, a face contorted in anguish, a car or a building exploding. Suddenly I realized that one of the scenes I had flicked past did not belong to a drama series but to a newscast on war in the Balkans. Among the other images which cumulatively diluted the horror of violence, I had watched, unmoved, a real person being hit by a real bullet.

George Steiner suggested that the Holocaust translated the horrors of our imagined hells into a reality of charred flesh and bone; it may be that this translation marked the beginning of our modern inability to imagine another person’s pain. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the horrible torments of martyrs depicted in countless paintings were never viewed simply as images of horror: they were illumined by the theology (however dogmatic, however catechistic) that bred and defined them, and their representation was meant to help the viewer reflect on the world’s ongoing suffering. Not every viewer would necessarily see beyond the mere prurience of the scene, but the possibility for deeper reflection was always present. After all, an image or a text can only offer the choice of reading further or more profoundly; this choice the reader or viewer can reject since in themselves text and image are nothing but dabs on paper, stains on wood or canvas.

The images I watched that night were, I believe, nothing but surface; like pornographic texts (political slogans, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, advertising pap), they offered nothing but what the senses could apprehend immediately, all at once, fleetingly, without space or time for reflection.

Alice’s Looking-Glass Wood is not made up of such images: it has depth, it requires thought, even if (for the time of its passing) it offers no vocabulary to name its proper elements. True experience and true art (however uncomfortable the adjective has become) have this in common: they are always greater than our comprehension, even than our capabilities of comprehension. Their outer limit is always a little past our reach, as the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik once described:

And if the soul were to ask, Is it still far? you must answer:

On the other side of the river, not this one, the one just beyond.

To come even this far, I have had many and marvelous guides. Some overwhelming, others more intimate, many vastly entertaining, a few illuminating more than I could hope to see. Their writing keeps changing in the library of my memory, where circumstances of all sorts — age and impatience, different skies and different voices, new and old commentaries — keep shifting the volumes, crossing out passages, adding notes in the margins, switching jackets, inventing titles. The furtive activity of such anarchic librarians expands my limited library almost to infinity: I can now reread a book as if I were reading one I had never read before.

In Bush, his house in Concord, the seventy-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson began suffering from what was probably Alzheimer’s disease. According to his biographer Carlos Baker: “Bush became a palace of forgetting…. [But] reading, he said, was still an ‘unbroken pleasure.’ More and more the study at Bush became his retreat. He clung to the comforting routine of solitude, reading in his study till noon and returning again in the afternoon until it was time for his walk. Gradually he lost his recollection of his own writings, and was delighted at rediscovering his own essays: ‘Why, these things are really very good,’ he told his daughter.”

Something like Emerson’s rediscovery happens now when I take down The Man Who Was Thursday or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and meet them like Adam greeting his first giraffe.

Is this all?

Sometimes it seems enough. In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change, and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood.

Room for the Shadow

“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury.

They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: “Unimportant, your Majesty means of course,” he said, in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.