I
Propositions
1. Reading creates minds in its image.
A whole life, “right alongside the rest of [a] life,” can be lived inside books. A life spent reading affirms the feeling it also creates, that books have “insides.” A book is a “commodity inclusive / of the idea, the art object, the exact spot in which to live.” We shelter there, or cower, or delight, or rage; we “dream with our eyes open,” “separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things,” “driving to the interior,” from which we emerge “changed, healed, charged.” Reading is individual, “the repository of [one’s] inner self-relation,” and it is communal: into that “single, immobile and solitary act,” “all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated.” These powers are thrilling and dangerous, “a betrayal of the dominant order of things,” and they are tender, our lives “held precariously in the seeing / hands of others.” “It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation.”
2. Readers should read.
Reading is one portal among many to rich inner experience. It is one mode among many of living the life that one has, astonishingly and against all odds, been given. Not everyone has to be a reader. If reading is what William James called a “living option” in one’s life, however, if it is a possibility felt to be open to any extent, then it is good to do it with one’s whole attention, while also asking nothing in particular of it, or of one’s self, while doing it. Reading in this way is doing something, not failing to do something else. It can be surprisingly hard to hold on to this truth, however powerfully we experience it.
3. A reader should read every day.
People who like to read should do more of it. The reasons not to do it are endless, and people who think of themselves as book lovers, who have the wherewithal to choose how they use their time, are often the most in thrall to them. Reading is time-consuming and requires focus. One has to sit down to do it, in a quiet place. Too many people actually do lack the essential conditions for reading: time and silence. These are scarce resources. For the many other people who have these advantages, however, and for the smaller number who would call themselves readers, and who yet do not actually read in any sustained way, much of what looks like external pressure is actually the mask of an internal reluctance. Reading without purpose is playful, and play is not easy for adults. It induces a “perfectly useless concentration” that will not make the reader seem or feel productive. There are no prizes for reading, no pay raises for it, no competitive advantage in it. It accomplishes nothing.
All reading has to offer is a particular, irreplaceable internal experience. Readers should keep faith that that experience is enough. We should fight for it, especially if the fight is against our own sense of obligation to the world. Reading is an activity, a doing something, that takes place in D. W. Winnicott’s “potential space,” a region neither inside nor outside the self, but a paradoxical place that is both. It is an adult form of the dreamy, abstracted play of children that happens in “an area that cannot be easily left, nor can it easily admit intrusions.” We go there because we have a self that must be articulated, and because we do not have a self until we find its articulation. We think and are thought, dream and are dreamed by what we read. “The actual world does shear away,” says C. D. Wright. “The reader is there for the duration, and leaves with reluctance.”
4. We read elsewhere.
Reading as I mean it here has one distinctive feature: in doing it the reader steps aside from the “actual world.” That step can be characterized in a number of ways—as escape, transcendence, respite, rejection, subversion, suspension, or otherwise. All of these terms will describe a single reader’s experience of reading over time, often simultaneously. What matters is the reader’s recognition that she is stepping aside, and her commitment to following whatever path that step reveals. No one can tell another person with certainty what kind of book will allow her to wander in this way. Thoreau prescribes books “we have to stand on tiptoe to read.” Jane Hirshfield says “only words that enlarge the realm of the possible merit borrowing our attention from the world of the actual and the living.” Each reader finds a personal canon of such challenging and enlarging books and spends a lifetime, if he or she is lucky, revising it. No two canons will be the same, but in the shared experience of encountering language (at least some of the time) at the edges of our capacity to understand, and feeling (with whatever initial balance of guilt and excitement) that we have withdrawn for a while from the world’s claims on us, we are reading.
5. “Why not be alone together?”
Imagine that in reading you take part in communitas: “a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body … [that] evolves … out of the desire of its participants to get to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together.” In its collective sense this is the “participatory corps” required to keep reading alive as a form of experience. Imagine that somewhere a wheel turns and continues to turn only so long as people are reading. The complementary term to communitas is civitas, an institution “dependent on rulers to protect its integrity and authorities to guide its beliefs.” We consent to live in a given civitas, however mixed our feelings may be about the terms and conditions our participation entails. We also participate in communitas, as expressed in a potentially infinite number of spontaneously formed and dissolved communities of interest and inquiry. The lines between our civil and communal lives are not clearly drawn, and the lines as we feel them in our own lives may look entirely different to others. While expressions of communitas are notoriously subject to co-optation by the rulers of civitas for their own ends, no civitas, however enlightened, can answer the questions that drive communitas. Reading is a way to keep asking vital questions in the company of others.
6. Reading will not save us.
By its nature communitas, including its expression as people who read, promises nothing, least of all a better self or world. Reading may have benefits (we hear often about a heightened sense of empathy, an alertness to logic and nuance, and a lengthened attention span) but is not a virtue. Goodness (a refusal to inflict suffering, a curiosity about the lives of others, an inclination to serve?) has never been associated with the literary mind more than any other. Violence is perpetrated by and in the name of readers. Reading conduces to inwardness, but many good people are not inward, and many inward people are not good.
7. Our reading is historical.
If we don’t know that reading makes us or the world good, why do we care if no one does it? Why in particular should we be alarmed by reports of reading’s demise as a widespread pastime? Perhaps we shouldn’t, exactly. If reading disappears, something else will take its place. Not its precise place; if reading were lost, much that is valuable would be lost. But we would get over it, or successive generations would, and whatever replaced it would have advantages we can’t imagine. Writing itself is a technology, and a fairly recent one, that decimated older forms of communication and experience, and created new ones that shape the world as we currently understand it. “Homo sapiens,” writes Walter Ong, “has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6,000 years ago.” “Of all the many thousands of languages,” he continues,
—possibly tens of thousands—spoken in the course of human history only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all.… Even now hundreds of languages in active use are never written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them. The basic orality of language is permanent.
For those many preliterate millennia human culture had its own orally based thought-world, as it still does. While writing brings with it unique capacities for abstract thought and linear reasoning, it is difficult for a literate mind to imagine the costs it has entailed to orally based knowledge structures. It is impossible even to name such structures once the mind has been (as ours have all been) permeated with writing: “Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature’ is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels.”
8. The history of reading is flowing, and flown.
Debates about the power, pitfalls, and proper use of this new technology underlie Western philosophy and remain contentious today. Socrates, “speaking” in a dialogue that descends to us entirely by means of Plato’s writing, warns of the inevitable cost to human consciousness when we fix knowledge outside our speaking selves:
If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.
Members of the generation that has lost knowledge of basic mathematics to omnipresent calculators, and of phone numbers to cell phone storage, might object that Socrates is here right about the fragility of memory, but too alarmed about the consequences of that fragility. What is so bad about forgetting if things are in fact written down?
Socrates’s answer is that what is lost when the human interlocutor disappears is not the content of what he has to say, but the context that makes what he has to say meaningful. The diminished capacity of writing to teach, in other words, is what is at stake. He explains:
Written words … seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong.
From this perspective, a book in the hands of people who can read is a difficult force to control, a potential pathogen with limitless undefended hosts to infect. Even worse, words themselves, separated from the breath that incarnated them, become the objects of our contemplation. Marks on a page, designed to be simple transmitters, incidental vessels for the sacred fire of speech, have themselves drawn our focus and proliferated into complex systems of their own that compete for our worshipful attention. If language “is both a map of the world and its own world,” readers are obsessive cartographers, moving always on the border of two spheres. Nietzsche writes approvingly that “only just now … is it dawning on people that they have propagated a colossal error with their belief in language. Luckily, it is too late for the development of reason, which rests upon that belief, to be reversed.”
9. Reading is a danger to reason.
There is surprisingly little disagreement about reading’s capacity to drive us right out of our minds. So well understood is the connection between reading and madness that Cervantes only needs one sentence to establish a plausible basis for Don Quixote’s many hundreds of pages’ worth of misadventures:
In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.
Two and a half centuries, one continent, and an entire culture later, Emily Dickinson describes her family’s parallel understanding, telling her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “[My father] buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind.”
10. Books are a realm of unreason.
Even as we have agreed as a culture to let words, in Plato’s phrase, “drift all over the place,” we live with an anxiety around the act of unsupervised reading, as though books have a life and a will of their own. Our feelings about the disposal of unwanted books reflect that sense. Like flags, books require special handling. They may be burned, in spectacular, emblematic, purifying fires. They may be preserved in specially built, temperature-controlled buildings, tended by trained professionals who regulate access to them. They may simply accumulate because it is impossible to put them in the trash. They are industrially pulped in a process readers don’t like to think about.
Books bring out the animistic in people. We mistrust books’ passive appearance as mere objects because the life they contain is so palpable. When a priest comes to burn the books of chivalry that have driven Quixote mad the books put up no fight, “waiting with all the patience in the world for the fire that threatened [them].” By contrast, the housekeeper helping the priest takes sensible precautions, imploring him to sprinkle the room with holy water so that “no enchanter, of the many in these books, can put a spell on us as punishment for wanting to drive them off the face of the earth.” The housekeeper’s fear is funny, and the joke still works. In a 1997 episode of Friends, Quixote’s housekeeper is present in spirit when Joey tries to neutralize a scary book by putting it in the freezer.
11. Books are childish things.
Readers like to have books around because they continue to murmur after they have been read; they are living extensions of our minds into a space not wholly ours. A book is an object and a subject, a dweller halfway between alive and not alive. Children create such objects for themselves as a matter of course, long before they read. Toys of all kinds, blankets, and parts of their own bodies function as “transitional objects,” developmental psychology’s term for the objects children use to comfort themselves, which they invest with imaginative life.
The essential thing about a child’s choice of transitional object is that the child makes it freely. She may choose the thing her mother suggests (by putting it in her crib), or the thing that most children choose (a thumb, say), but the child alone decides which object will be meaningful and goes about making it so. Reading, in the sense that most matters, must also happen freely. Like most of what we do in our lives lived here, “down, down in the terrestrial,” our reading is circumscribed by factors beyond our control (How many languages do any of us read with ease? Which books do our peers read? What do current market forces think we ought to be reading?). All the same, if we concede that in the purest sense “the choice is never wide and never free,” it is essential that our reading stays wild. It is not coincidental that students are bored by books they are required to read, even when those books began as scandals and guilty pleasures. It matters that we are frequently bored by the books we require ourselves to read. It may be that the most important function of required reading is to stimulate our resistance to it in the form of reading that is haphazard, spontaneous, whimsical, contrarian.
12. “Admittedly [we] err.”
In a word, our reading is best when it is promiscuous, “Done or applied with no regard for method, order, etc.; random, indiscriminate, unsystematic” (Oxford English Dictionary). Books themselves “drift all over the place” and so should we in our encounters with them. Erring is the path, losing our way is the way. Reading allows us to be surprised, and for that joyful and frightening privilege we pay with our willingness to be wayward and partial, undefended and incomplete. Any guides to reading this way will “only [have] at heart your getting lost,” and so will not look like guides at all. To read is to wander in a direction, to yield to a current. Allowing the words of another to flow through the mind is a way of playing make-believe, not simply that what the words say is true, but that the mind behind them is true, that there are minds besides our own, with which we can play at merging and harmonizing.
13. USE USE USE / YR BODY AND YR MIND
Reading imaginative literature, which includes any number of books called nonfiction or history or philosophy, and which may or may not include reams of what are called novels, stories, and poems, means finding it first. “We shall have to resign ourselves to this,” says Roberto Calasso, “that literature offers no signs, has never offered any signs, by which it can immediately be identified.” Calasso suggests instead that readers find signs in their own bodies, citing Housman’s sequence of words that “sets the hairs of the beard on end,” and the “new shiver” Hugo felt while reading Baudelaire. Examples of such testimony are plentiful. Despite reading’s bad physical reputation (“much reading is a weariness of the flesh,” warns Ecclesiastes), readers rely intimately on their bodies in registering the psychic effects of reading. Emily Dickinson is emphatic on the subject:
If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.
Marianne Moore, searching for an adequate definition of “the genuine” that may be found in poetry, compares it to “hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must.” Our bodies read along with our minds; we feel with both the “force and beauty” of art’s process. This is true also during the more frequent times that our reading is not accompanied by noticeable physical response. Adam Phillips observes that “in states of absorption, the … object that disappears is the body. The good-enough environment of the body can be taken for granted; it is most reliably present by virtue of its absence.”
Our bodies, at rest or brought singingly to life, are our instruments in reading, keeping time in the background, playing and being played upon by the text. “Even and especially in our day, in our amnesiac land,” affirms C. D. Wright, “poets are the griots, the ones who see that the word does not break faith with the line of the body.” The line linking language and body is as fine and strong as spider silk, registering the least tremors on either end. Lines of writing need a pulse and a pace, a shapeliness to draw us in, and the promise of a full consciousness guiding them, different from our own but alike in fullness. They are lifelines in both directions.
14. Reading is a grown-up pleasure.
Reading is a home for sexual promise and longing. It is an education in the pleasures of sameness and strangeness, of bringing another mind to life, of feeling one’s own self overlaid by and intermixed with another’s. Mastery and skill are evanescent goals in the world of reading. Held to too long they become reading’s opposite, power pursued by other means. Reading lays us as bare as we can stand to be. We come to it undefended, with only our capacity for response to guide us, or we don’t come to it at all. In this way it is a simple and strict practice, one with infinite variations and turns, but no shortcuts and few signposts.
It does, however, reward dawdling and experimentation. Subterfuge, faithlessness, and fickleness are all intimate parts of the reader’s life: “There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings.… This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.” Books are endlessly patient; they “stop somewhere, waiting for you.” There is no penalty for abandoning or outgrowing one’s old attachments in the world of literature, and no stigma accompanies widely ranging taste and an expansive array of partners to satisfy it. We mature as readers by becoming more present in a primal arena where we can test the objects of our desire by bringing to them the full range of our selves: our weakness, our aggression, our hunger, our “perfect contempt.”
15. Reading is an act of self-determination.
“Books promiscuously read” is Milton’s phrase for the reading he argues people should do, without interference from licensing bodies, despite authorities’ fears that readers will be led into vice by reading the wrong books:
Since … the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of vice? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
The sexual connotation of “promiscuous” did not predominate for another 250 years, but it is latent in Milton’s metaphors: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue.… That virtue … which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.” Milton did not mean that actual women should read freely, let alone that they should go out and experience “the utmost that vice promises to her followers.” In the mid-seventeenth century the virtue that free access to books threatened belonged to the relatively small number of people, found mostly among the male members of the aristocratic and professional classes, who could read them. Good arguments, however, have a way of exceeding the imaginations of those who make them. Free minds require and shape free bodies, and vice versa; any social system with an interest in keeping bodies unfree is well advised to guard literacy carefully. Janie, the journeying heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God, needs three marriages and a brush with violent death to learn what her author suggests she might have known a lot sooner: “she didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
16. Reading is insidious.
With respect to reading we live in a world unrecognizable to a man of Milton’s day, but global literacy is still an elusive goal, and women are still excluded from it at grossly disproportionate rates. This is not accidental. The list of forces that have made literacy available and necessary on a vast scale is long: in the West, revolutions in printing technology, the entry of women into the commercial sphere and the expansion of public education that supported it, and the accompanying centuries-long shift in higher education away from classical to demotic languages, just to name three such forces, all made an exponentially increased number of texts accessible to an ever more heterogeneous body of individuals. As the number and variety of readers increased, so did the intensity of the debates about who ought to read what or be taught to read at all.
As well they might. Reading is insidious. It happens where no one else can see. One can read to another person, but not for him—it is done by one individual, silently. Those who love to do it and those who wish to regulate it are reacting to the same principle: reading is radically private. Its privacy is a mystery, because it exists out in the open, within anyone who reads, anywhere she does it, and because it takes place in a part of ourselves where we are unfixed, becoming, not quite a self that knows what boundaries it needs to protect. In that soft place there are no guarantees; “we must never assume that we know exactly what is happening when anyone else reads a book.” Reading is an irritant to anyone who wants to maintain power over another, because reading is a form of self-possession that enmeshes us with others as subjects. “The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am the center of my own.” There is no cordoning off of sexual or civic freedom from this process. The ability to read means the power to absorb all messages, “valentines and messages of state; or soberer news.”
Copyright © 2021 by Heather Cass White
