I’m going to write about reading during the time of the Virus but the Virus itself makes it feel as if reading is superfluous, as if we should be gathering at hospitals in groups and emptying bedpans, cooking meals in mass kitchens for the workers, sitting with the sick who have no family, not conducting our abnormal normal lives with a book in hand, occasionally slinking off to a deserted room to crack it open and reside inside its way more tolerable worlds.
The weird remoteness of the crisis has been disorienting. Unless you know someone with the infection, it’s as if 60,000 Americans have disappeared and stores and traffic also shut down, like a Twilight Zone version of an eternal universal Sabbath and Rapture, and yet, we are only at the beginning of the Virus, its immediate effects and the deep long term economic and social disturbances it will provoke.
Because the Virus is not a bombing or fire or earthquake where human beings run to help in their aftermaths, but instead a form of antimatter, a force that must repel others if we wish to stay well, we remain cut off from that yearning to help strangers which marks the best quality of our species, and so like literate foxes denned securely below the terrible wind and boom of the storm, some of us are able to spend time reading.
I’ve been reading about the Dirty War in Argentina in the 70’s and 80’s, Kafka’s short fiction, various histories of ancient Greece, the end of a trilogy on politics at the court of Henry VIII, and novels about Jesse James and about a community of women trying to decide how to respond to men who have abused them for years. The Virus has added another screen behind which to read but also a vast new set of associations that connect with any subject matter. Look at the list I’ve just laid out. Do you not immediately see how our new circumstances might impact how we read any text? However, it’s not so much what I’ve been reading as how I read (and by extension how you read) that I wish to describe.
As you can see from my most recent list, I have the appetite of a slightly deranged mouse, always hungry, skittering about from seed lair to centipede morsel to new green shoots of flowers. I read in the early morning under a single lamp, at the kitchen table on a hard chair hunched over like the grammar student I once was, trying to get away with reading a book behind the shoulders of another while Sister Yosemite Sam cried out before our vast numbers and occasionally detonated. I read often when I’m watching TV, Wolfie’s head nestled just so against my neck. I read balanced on two legs of a folding chair in the sun, my feet on a stone wall, the birds flying nearby. And like Parul Sehgal, book critic, who said that “she can only read lying down, and preferably late at night, when everyone else is asleep.”*
Even though I still retain the deep focus necessary to read against a backdrop of most anything — apocalyptic barking, Godzilla roaring from the TV, a dryer clacking away, like Sehgal, I prefer finally to be abed on a winter’s night, propped up, the wind trying to insinuate itself through the skylight, one good light on the page, silence, silence, and finally dissolving, finally slowing down, entering the sentences and images as if I were in possession of a vision that ends in sleep and dreams.
What are you reading and when and where and how?
I hope you are doing well out there.
*TLS
