I know that I have held a book in my hand every day since I was 6 or 7 years old. That long ago, reading ceased being a choice. It has become as natural to me as a sense of my own pulse. For me, a book is the perfectly designed object, sensual in its weight and the array of its scents, balanced, portable, easy in its use, a pleasure to hold; often, in the design of its dust jacket or cover or in its illustrations, a pleasure to look at. It is a kind of face — mysterious, full of promises, a thing that offers anticipation as a buzz of enjoyment.
Reading is a form of watching close up and from afar. In War and Peace we enter the intimacy of the inner life of Pierre and also gaze at the great battle of Borodino as if a god in the sky. Reading is a quieting. One leaves the shove and pull of the ‘out there’. It is a branch of solitude that can afford communion, connection, solidarity. If we possess a willing heart, we can read alone and reach out to the human condition. We open ourselves to the fact of our commonalities of sorrow and joy. Marilynne Robinson said, “With any piece of fiction, any piece of literature, the assumption is that a human life matters.”*
In that sense my reading has always been theological. The nuns taught us that humility and grace are natural companions, that Christ forgives, that all are welcome at the table, whore and saint and thief. In details I cannot unravel, reading and ethics are entwined.
Reading has been an escape but in the same respect as movement: if you move, they can’t catch you, pin you down, make you fit the box. If you read, they can’t own all of you. Thus, books are a flight away from all those ‘they’s’ who seek to constrict a life — technology, media, a social order, one’s past.
And yet, I am not a bibliophile. I regularly cull my books. I do not own thousands — maybe 350. Now I buy many more books to give as gifts than I buy for myself. As a boy, I began reading science fiction and history. Now, I read novels and history but probably more poetry than anything else.
And yet — my entire life has been taken up with books. I read them, taught them, sell them, give them, write them**.
As an older man I have a pretty good idea as to what made me: love, dogs, journeys, teaching, my parents, nuns, friends in various incarnations of cruelty and kindness and books. I know which books re-formed me. I found myself altered on the other side of their pages: Moby Dick, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Ulysses, King Lear, Wallace Stevens’ and Seamus Heaney’s poems, Hamlet, For Whom the Bell Tolls, War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, the short stories of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, The Brothers Karamazov, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy. Each title is like a scene opening up in my mind’s eye — I know where I was, how old, with whom I was living when I began to read them. The upstairs reading area of the Kutztown College library at night for Catton. My single bed in West Lawn in 7th grade for a big, illustrated version of Moby Dick. My desk in a back room on Porter’s Mill Road, very late and snowing for King Lear. In an isolated old house near Boyertown, next to a wood stove for Pilgrim.
Book goes on to book, to new owners, to moments of recognition. In Maine a few weeks ago I found a second hand book store stocked with several thousand old books, a cache of the odd and the beautiful. I went back to it 4 times. I got down on my hands and knees to examine each stack. I bought 45 of them, most for $1 each, some for gifts, but most for the store where I work where they have found their long path to prominent display. Eventually, someone will come along and pick one up and utter a little “oh” and take it home. That person will find a seat with good light, open the cover and begin. There is no choice, not really. Each book is the new world, and if this one disappoints, there is always another. That bond will not fray. As long as one can hold a book in hand, another occasion of grace is inevitable.
*Casey Cep, “Book of Revelation”. The New Yorker, 10.05.2020
** A caveat — 4 books of poetry and a sort of biography of my parents all of which I paid to have printed at a FedEx office.
