OF READING AND BOOKS
The Eskimo’s (Inuit) are
famously held to have a great number of words for snow.[1] I have always felt the
same should also be true in the English language respecting the concept of ‘reading.'
A few years back I was
asked whether I read the Metro on my way to work. I shot back that you didn't read the Metro you looked at it. Leaving aside that such a remark was way too smart arsed, there was a deep truth to what I was saying.
We say that we are reading when
looking at a advertising hoarding, thumbing through a tabloid newspaper, trying to understand an instruction manual, or absorbing War and Peace or
Schopenhauer. All involve deciphering symbols on a page but they represent
profoundly different phenomenon.
Real reading, if I can
call it that, is an intense experience, also it is a two way process, good
books read you as much as you read them. By this I mean that the process of
reading great writing challenges you to examine your own thinking, your way of
viewing the world, the processes at the heart of your sense of self. This though is less than half the story.
The most potent aspect of
reading is its intimacy; it takes place within an indefinable cocoon, the drama
and emotion of a great novel like Crime and Punishment or Middlemarch take place within
this cocoon. A Tardis, closed and intimate yet vast and panoramic. Here too in
this intimate space ideas come to life and new ways of seeing the world are
born.
I took part in a group warm up
exercise a few years back when each member was asked in turn to name the greatest achievement
of their lives to date. I had no hesitation in stating “learning to read.” This
time I was not being a smart arse. Without the ability to read my
life would have been indescribably poorer. I see illiteracy as much a
catastrophe as being blind or deaf.
By speaking of learning to
read I am not of course referring purely to the basic process of deciphering
hieroglyphics, this represents merely the first step. I am talking of becoming acquainted with books. Books have the power to break down prison walls and
transform people, set the imagination on fire and produce tears of sadness and despair.
Books can induce the gentle melancholy of reflection and produce the indignant
rage of revolution. It is no wonder that for centuries books were so
expensively bound, knowledge acknowledged as a precious material.
Though never, as they say,
judge a book by its cover; a cheap Penguin copy of Hamlet or Plato' Republic
carries the same valuable contents as the most expensively bound copies.
In speaking of books I am
aware that to some I may already be sounding anachronistic, aware of the
emergence of the e-reader. Now I am sure that devices such as Kindle have their
merits,* however they miss one vital component of books and that is
physicality. Books have weight, they have shape and form and of course you may
experience all the pleasures of possession. Few things for me are as
aesthetically pleasing as shelves filled with books of every shape and size.
Each an undiscovered land, for it is a common mistake to assume that the mere purchase of a book means
that you ‘own’ it, you only truly own a book once you have read it. So I am now going off to do some serious reading.
A book sits on my coffee
table, ‘Afghantsy, The Russians In Afghanistan 1979 -89,’ by Rodric
Braithwaite, a door that I will soon open.
*They strike me as very
useful devices for reading and storing magazines.
THIS POST WILL SHORTLY BE MOVED TO THE BLUE ROOM
[1] It seems this is somewhat
exaggerated. http://www.princeton.edu/~browning/snow.html
Still as an idea this feels that it ought to be true.
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