A Reader on Reading

To these visions of reading, I would like to add three more, imagined not too long ago by Ray Bradbury for our not-so-distant future.

In one of the stories of The Martian Chronicles, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a fully automated house offers as an evening diversion to read a poem to its inhabitants, and when it receives no response it selects and reads a poem on its own, unaware that the entire family has been annihilated in a nuclear war. This is the future of reading without readers.

Another story, “Usher II,” records the saga of a heroic devotee of Poe in an age when fiction is considered not a source of thought but something dangerously real. After Poe’s works are outlawed, a passionate reader builds a weird and perilous house as a shrine to his hero, through which he destroys both his enemies and the books he intends to avenge. This is the future of readers without reading.

The third, the most famous, is in Fahrenheit 451 and depicts a future in which books are burned and groups of literature lovers have memorized their favorite books, carrying them around in their heads like walking libraries. This is a future in which readers and reading, in order to survive, follow Augustine’s precept and become one and the same.

Automated reading that requires no readers; the act of reading left to old-fashioned cranks who believe in books not as monsters but as places for dialogue; books transformed into a memory carried about until the mind caves in and the spirit fails … these scenarios suit our new century: the end of books set against the end of time, after the end of the second millennium. At the end of the first, the Adamites burned their libraries before joining their brethren in preparation for the Apocalypse so as not to carry useless wisdom into the promised Kingdom of Heaven.

Our fears are endemic fears, rooted in our time. They do not branch into the unknowable future; they demand a conclusive answer, here and now. “Stupidity,” wrote Flaubert, “consists in a desire to conclude.” Indeed. As every reader knows, the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history the act preserves. In Carpaccio’s painting Augustine sits, as attentive as his dog, pen poised, book shining like a screen, looking straight into the light, listening. The room, the instruments keep changing, the books on the shelf shed their covers, the texts tell stories in voices not yet born.

PART SIX

Books as Business

“I should like to buy an egg, please,” she said timidly.

“How do you sell them?”

“Fivepence farthing for one—twopence for two,” the

Sheep replied.

“Then two are cheaper than one?” Alice said in a surprised

tone, taking out her purse.

“Only you must eat them both, if you buy two,” said the

Sheep.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

Reading White for Black

“Do you know Languages? What’s French for fiddle-de-dee?”

“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely.

“Who ever said it was?” said the Red Queen.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9

For Christine Le Boeuf

THROUGHOUT PART OF 1992 AND 1993, I worked on the translation of three short stories by Marguerite Yourcenar. The stories, published in French under the title Conte bleu, which I rendered in English as A Blue Tale, are early works by the writer who was to become in later life such an accomplished stylist. Understandably, because they were written with the exuberance and know-all of youth, the stories stray from time to time from sober blue to lurid purple. Since translators, unlike writers and God Himself, have the possibility of amending the faults of the past, it seemed to me that to preserve every glitter and volute of Yourcenar’s young text would have been nothing but a pedantic undertaking, less intended for lovers of literature than for literary archaeologists. Furthermore, the English language is less patient with ebullience than French. And so it was that a few times—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—I silently clipped an adjective or pruned a simile.