Rereading and Reading

I’ve returned in my eighth decade to books and authors I had read in my fourth: Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, a great deal of Philip Roth, Henry James, Willa Cather . . . And I have been wondering what has drawn me to this catalog of my younger days. I do not have any desire to actually study the texts so that I can write about them for academic journals: I have no CV to pad. I take a few notes for my journal but probably will not return often to my entries, and when I do it often becomes an inspiration for this blog! No do I intend to teach these books: I have no students and do not desire to reenter a classroom. Many of the people with whom I keep company do not read the books I have read and am now rereading, and so if these books are part of their libraries they do not have interest in discussing them in book-group-like settings, or to enter conversation over one bourbon, one scotch and one beer. And so I wonder what sought after relief I seek in these books now; to my bookshelves and not the book stores.

Kate Zambreno states “What is the space of literature for if not as a scratching pad for our irritants.” What does my present reading say about what irritates me. I reread the books that I remember enjoying back when I did study texts for different motives: degrees and publications and syllabi. It is not that person that requires relief from those irritants because that person no longer is so bothered, couldn’t care less and feels no discomfort. Rather, whatever irritant I experience vexes me in the present. It is that individual who is by something bothered. Irritated, as it were, and seeks out a scratching pad for the troublesome itch without really knowing the source of that itch. Because if the book can’t offer relief then it is useless. I recognize that it must be a cliché that we reread in the present to discover in the reading how we have changed from our first experience of the book. In this instance the underlying irritant can be identified as a wonder who I might be in the present as would be revealed by the rereading of the book. What does the rereading say about what I have learned over the years of my life that is discovered by this present experience with the page-worn, even annotated book from the past. 

Of Middlemarch and Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady and some of his shorter works) I can say this much: there is a flow to the sentences that inspires in me a quietening even despite a disquieting subject matter. I am drawn into the text and I pull it over me as I do my blanket that covers me weven hile I read. I have recently observed that the prose in these novels runs continuously without narrative breaks within the chapter; in these texts the breaks occur only betweenchapters. In these books, then, there is no pause in the narrative. But in the contemporary fiction (and non-fiction) that I have tasted, breaks occur within the chapter and a considerable volume of white space comes to exist as the scene and emotional content changes in the narrative with some regularity, almost as if place in order to relieve a reader’s attention. It is a symptom, I think, of our shortened attention spans, our impatiences, that has led to the shorter sections within chapters that facilitates placing the bookmarks where in the reading we have become inattentive and too-soon intellectually and emotionally fatigued. In these contemporary texts we can abandon the effort when we might really endeavor on. Thoreau has said that this only is reading that causes one to stand on tip-toes. Too many books fail this criteria and leave us only flat-footed. In the books that I reread, however, and books I choose for even a first reading, I continue to a chapter’s end before I am satisfied to put the book down for a spell. And at chapter’s end I take a deep and relieved but untired breath and enjoy the effort I have made as I used to relish my body’s sense after a long run on the trail. I recognize now that in even the more contemporary books I have read and now reread—works by Iris Murdoch, Jose Saramajo, W.G. Sebald—I follow the unbroken prose until chapter’s end. I am there content and becalmed. 

So perhaps the irritant that sends me to the books is the disquiet of the political world, the multiple wars reported in the newspaper, the violence that continues to violate our very lives and destroys out peace, and the incivility that threatens our place. It is my own obsession with the internet and my life in my phone. These books offer me some retreat I must have known I sought as relief from my too-worldly irritants. The books I have taken to reread provide some haven from which I can think and consider the noisy and noisome world outside.

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