Reading Between the Lines A paean to the simple pleasures of the book--as text, object and experience
By Willard Spiegelman
I’m making a case for the pleasures of becoming engrossed in a book, silent and alone.
When I take a book from the shelf, I feel as I do at the theater before the curtain goes up. I am all anticipation. But with reading, unlike watching, I am not a passive audience. I open and close my book on my terms; I reread it when I am ready; I even read the same paragraph twice before proceeding. Pacing is everything: Stop and go, hover and resume. It all feels self-indulgent, even vaguely criminal. I can recall the secret childhood gratification of reading with a flashlight, under the covers at home or summer camp, after “lights out.” This was my version of bad behavior. Isolation has its merits.
Think of the many clichés used for reading: “I curled up with my book”; or “I couldn’t put it down,” “it was a page-turner,” “I lost myself.” Reading is of the body as well as the mind. Best of all: “I ate it up.” Francis Bacon articulated most succinctly this motif of reading and sustenance in “Of Studies”: “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
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More broadly, reading offers sensuous gratifications unavailable in other media: the feel, the smell, the heft of the book, the beauty of typefaces and the texture of paper. I remember the fun, when I was in school, of picking up a book in a store or library, attracted not by its author or title but by its cover, design or binding. Perhaps younger readers today can develop something like a physical attachment to disembodied screen pixels, but I doubt it. You want synesthesia? The book has it all.
Silent reading speaks to our individuality rather than our commonality. It is a facet of our interior life. It also has a history. Reading wasn’t always “reading.” It used to be “listening.” In ancient Greece, poetry was sung. Writing came later, but even in the first century A.D., Pliny the Younger was read to at mealtime. In the Middle Ages, Cistercian monks were also read to during meals, to encourage contemplation.
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In the stillness of the night, the solitary reader both absorbs and creates the truth he is reading. Such truth, in a calm world, itself “Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself / Is the reader leaning late and reading there.” One reader, one book, one page at a time, slowly. You need not wear your best clothes. Sit down. Pick up your book and read it: “Tolle, lege,” as St. Augustine said. We know which book he meant, but other readers will make other choices.
Each of us is alone. This knowledge may frighten. It may also console. Losing yourself in a book allows you to gain yourself, to become yourself. It turns out you are not alone. Like Machiavelli, you put yourself in touch with the noble dead. Like Stevens’s nocturnal reader, you put yourself in touch with the world.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/reading-between-the-lines-11586810133 (subscription)