Sadly, I'm not writing about the Roland Barthes text; I'm just writing about reading. I haven't posted anything to this blog in literally years, and a bunch that's on here probably ought to be moved. My original intent was to write about reading and writing, and nothing presently here is really about either.
Being who I am, I have no plans to strictly limit myself. Nonetheless, I have a knitting blog and a cooking blog, neither of which I've written for in quite a long time either. I have, however, been putting an emphasis on actually writing these days, so here's something I've actually written, and as it is about reading--something I've been doing and thinking a lot about lately--this seems an appropriate place. If you read this, feel free to leave comments. This essay is in a very rough state. It's self-indulgent as I imagine rough drafts often are, and I'm not sure that it's finished. I simply became exhausted while I was writing and had to come to a close.
On the Joys of Reading and Rereading (Not really the title because I haven't chosen one)
Once upon a time, I lived in San Antonio and worked at a place called City Year and rode the bus. A city like San Antonio just isn’t friendly to people who don’t have cars. I say this because it took forever to get anywhere on the bus. Really. For. Ever. What’s more, because we’re talking once-upon-a-time time, there were no iPods or iAnythings to fill up all that interminable bus time with. Some people had cell phones, but not many and not me. I wasn’t that cool. What I was, and am, however, is a reader, and all that interminable bus time was simply time where I had to read. I had to. What else was I going to do? Stare out the window? Listen to the criminal confessions of my fellow passengers? (I’m not joking about that last bit. It really happened. More than once.)
So I rode the bus, and I read. A lot. It was impossible to find me without a book in my possession, and even before the time of iAnythings, my books made me something of a novelty on the bus. People would actually stare, and sometimes they’d talk about me. They’d wonder why I was reading and what I was reading; they’d talk about what I was doing as if the fact of my reading rendered me deaf. Whether in English or Spanish, I never failed to understand that they were talking about me. It was fun to stare at the page and eavesdrop on their conversations, but there is one exchange I’ll always remember, not least of which because I actually wrote it down in the book I was reading.
Two people, middle-aged people, a man and a woman I think, started to talk about me and my reading. I only became conscious of it gradually because I was near the end of the book, a book that, though I had read it before a few times, was utterly absorbing, especially near the end. When their conversation about me entered my consciousness, they were trying to figure out what it was I was reading. I guess I must have had the book in my lap with the cover down so they couldn’t see it because they were speculating about the possible choices for my reading material. After probably throwing out a couple of things, the man said, “It’s not the Bible, is it?” I smiled with a pleasure that is still palpable and looked up, replying, “No, it’s not the Bible.” I think I looked down again almost immediately and went back to my reading, though not so quickly that I didn’t notice the look of embarrassment they both wore on realizing that I had heard every word they’d said. I’m almost sure I never told them what it was I was reading, but their conversation clarified for me something I’d known for a long time but don’t think I’d put into words: books, the ones I love, are my bibles. I memorize passages of them and recite them in times of trouble or joy; I quote them as advice to friends and sometimes strangers; I look to them for guidance about how I should live and how I should be in the world.
The book I was reading that day was The English Patient. It’s a book I’ve only just finished rereading. I don’t remember why I was reading it then. Perhaps I just felt like it; perhaps it was in the time of Richard, a man I’d fallen head over heels for; or perhaps it was, unknowingly, in preparation for falling for him. I was reading it days ago because I’m going through something in my romantic life, a kind of turmoil, and I wanted its comfort, its wisdom. I wanted to curl up inside of it the way one can always curl up inside of one’s favorite books. For me, anyway, it’s a kind of coming home and crawling under the covers of the most comfortable bed you’ve ever been in, warm and cozy and safe and at home like you can never be anywhere else. Unlike Kip, one of the novel’s characters, I have learned to trust in books.
The English Patient, particularly, is a novel I have come back to again and again. I must have read it nearly 10 times by now. In fact, I own two copies because my first one was filled with too many notes and underlinings in too many colors of pen and pencil. I’d needed a new one because I’d wanted a freshly made bed of paper filled with the dreams other people’s names. I also wanted to come at the novel fresh without the notes of former selves telling me what to think or feel about it. The copy I read this time I’d read only once before, so I had company, but it wasn’t crowded, even with the five main characters and the old me.
What strikes me about this book every time, aside from the concentrated poetry of the language, is how very much it has to say about my life, a remarkable feat if you consider that it is set at the end of World War II and just before and is populated by a Canadian, an Italian-Canadian, an Indian who would become a Pakistani after partition, a Hungarian, and an Englishwoman. That list ignores the multinational cast of characters in the desert and Cairo and the nasty German and his cohorts in Italy. Its locations are also foreign. I’ve never been to Italy, North Africa, Canada, or Pakistan. Furthermore, I’ve never been in a war or in a desert at all like the Sahara. In fact, nearly everything in the book is foreign to me. Except that it’s not.
How can a man from Sri Lanka and Canada writing about these lives so unlike mine, or probably his for that matter, know so much about me, so much about what I think and feel and know and need to know? That’s the magic of books, though, isn’t it? Like the Bible, they contain multitudes—multitudes of men and women and places and stories. The good ones do, anyway, and I think that’s the trick, really. It’s the way books, the Bible and bibles, connect us to one another and lay the world out at our feet. They allow us to see and be so many people and places and times. They make us bigger than ourselves and our small lives. They make us and remake us, and in doing so, they remake themselves because each time we come to them, we come to them as new people, and so they become new books.
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