Ruined By Reading Read online

  RARELY does the daily paper move me to reexamine my life. But a recent New York Times piece quoted a Chinese scholar whose “belief in Buddhism … has curbed his appetite for books.” Mr. Cha says, “To read more is a handicap. It is better to keep your own mind free and to not let the thinking of others interfere with your own free thinking.” I clipped his statement and placed it on the bedside table, next to a pile of books I was reading or planned to read or thought I ought to read. The clipping is about two square inches and almost weightless, the pile of books some nine inches high, weighing a few pounds. Yet they face each other in perfect balance. I am the scale on which they rest.

  Lying in the shadow of the books, I brood on my reading habit. What is it all about? What am I doing it for? And the classic addict’s question, What is it doing for me? Mr. Cha’s serenity and independence of mind are enviable. I would like to be equally independent, but I’m not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on it is properly termed “interference.” I suspect the interaction of the mind and the book is something more complex. I can see it encompassing an intimate history and geography: the evolution of character, the shifting map of personal taste. And what about the uses of language itself, as well as the perennial lure of narrative? But perhaps casting the issue in such large terms only shows how enslaved I am. Buddhism aside, there is no Readers Anonymous, so far, to help curb this appetite.

  Luckily I am not prey to every kind of reading, for there are many kinds, as there are many kinds of love, not all of them intoxicating. There is pure and specific curiosity: how would an Israeli Arab regard growing up in an inhospitable state, or who was Albertine, really, or what is it like to be brilliantly gifted and in love and desperately ill at twenty-three years old? Then we don’t read directly for the “high,” though we may find it, in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques or Keats’s letters, but to satisfy the mind. Or less specific curiosity: What is anthropology, I used to wonder—the enterprise itself, not the exotic data, since ordinary urban life provides enough exotic data. How do you approach the study of “man” or “culture”? How do you tilt your head, what angle of vision? I read enough to find out how the discipline works, which is by accumulation and accretion, making a mosaic. You gather and place enough pieces, then step back and look. I saw the pattern most luminously in Ruth Benedicts brilliant study, Patterns of Culture, which still sits stalwartly on my shelf in its thirty-five-cent Penguin paperback edition, the pages going brown but not yet flaking, still viable, still credible. Even from the old-fashioned précis under each chapter heading I sensed that here I would find what I wanted: “Man moulded by custom, not instinct”; “All standards of behavior relative”; “Peoples who never heard of war”; “Death, the paramount affront.” Irresistible. I read, there and elsewhere, and when the design was clear to me, I stopped.

  We may read for facts alone: the eye skims along, alert for key words, and when they appear, like red lights on a highway, it slides deftly to a halt. That kind of reading propelled me out of graduate school. However useful, it does not feel like true reading but more like shopping, riffling through racks for the precise shade of blue. I would have made a poor and ludicrous scholar, like a diva singing ditties in TV commercials, or a pastry chef condemned to macrobiotic menus.

  My addiction is to works of the imagination, and even if I became a Buddhist, I think I couldn’t renounce them cold turkey. Not after a lifetime, the better part of which was spent reading. Was it actually the better part, though? Did I choose or was I chosen, shepherded into it like those children caught out early on with a talent for the violin or ballet, baseball or gymnastics, and tethered forever to bows and barres, bats and mats? We didn’t know any alternatives; there was no chance to find them out. Reading, of all these, does not win huge sums of money or applause, or give joy and solace to others. What it does offer is a delectable exercise for the mind, and Mr. Cha, the Buddhist scholar, might well find it an indulgence. Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

  Despite all this mental pirouetting, or maybe because of it, I don’t remember much of what I’ve read. My lifelong capacity for forgetting distresses me. I glance at a book on the shelf that I once read with avid interest—Dorothy Gallagher’s All the Right Enemies, about the 1943 murder of the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca—and while I struggle for the details, all I recall is the excitement of the reading. I couldn’t give a cogent account of its dense intrigue or social history, yet I have some inchoate sense of the texture and dynamics of the subject.

  At least I remember there was a murder at stake, something I can’t always claim. When my younger daughter made disparaging remarks about Billy Budd I rushed to Melville’s defense with a speech on the conflict between the rule of law applied generically and the merits of individual cases. Billy Budd struck a superior officer, I reminded her; according to the letter of the law, he must hang. And yet, and yet, we cannot quite swallow it … I ended in a glow of ambivalence. “It wasn’t that he struck him,” she murmured. “He killed him.” I had totally forgotten, which was appalling. And yet, I consoled myself, I had remembered the conflict, and the dark malice of Claggart, and Billy’s faltering speech, and the terrible earnestness of Captain Vere, and the wry world-weariness of the old Dansker—modes of being swirling and contending like gases in the primeval void, to coalesce into a particular universe, a configuration of events. Wasn’t that enough? Not quite. What happens is important too. What do I have, then, after years of indulgence? A feel, a texture, an aura: the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides. Are they worth the investment of a life? Would my mind be more free without them?

  In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom. Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn’t give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don’t read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don’t thrill; only language thrills.

  I had put aside books before, naturally, but with guilt, sneaking them back to the shelves in the dark. It seemed a rudeness of the worst sort. A voice was attempting to speak to me and I refused to listen. A spiritual rudeness. Since childhood I had thought of reading as holy, and like all sacraments, it had acquired a stiff halo of duty. My cavalier throwing over a book midway may arise from the same general desacralization as does the notable increase in divorce, marriage also being a sacrament and, once entered upon, a duty. Every day joy and duty pull farther apart, like Siamese twins undergoing an excruciating but salutary operation: they were never meant to share a skin; they may look alike but their souls are different.

  So, like recidivist marryers, I take up the new book in good faith, planning to accompany it, for better or for worse, till the last page us do part, but … it stops being fun. Other, more intriguing, books send out pheromones. There are after all so many delectable books in the world. Why linger with one that doesn’t offer new delights, take me somewhere I’ve never been? I feel detached from the book on my lap much as the disaffected husband or wife feels detached from the body alongside and asks, why am I here, in this state of withness? In a marriage, one hopes it may be a transient feeling—there may be extenuating circumstances, although these lately do not seem to possess great force—but in the case of a book, why not be abandoned, and abandon?

  This is a far cry from my idealism at age twenty, when I longed to read everything, simply because it was w
ritten, like adventurers who climb Mount Everest because it is there. Other sensationalists must sample everything edible or try every feasible sexual posture, however slimy or arduous, respectively. Thus do they assure themselves they have truly lived. No experience has passed them by, as if exhaustiveness were the measure of the good life.

  Gradually I lost, or shed, the Mount Everest syndrome. Bookshelves still tease and tantalize, but like a woman with a divining rod, I know now where the water will be, I do not have to scrape earth and dig holes seeking, only there where the rod begins to tremble.

  The unfinished or unread books languish on my shelves, some bought because friends said I must read them (but it was they who had to read them), or because the reviews throbbed with largesse of spirit (but it was the reviewer I loved, just as Priscilla loved John Alden or Roxane, Cyrano. I should have bought the reviewer’s book). Others were just too gorgeously packaged to resist. Book jackets nowadays have become an art form, and browsing through a bookstore is a feast for the eyes. In some cases the jacket turns out to be the best thing about the book. I am not one to snub beauty, wherever it turns up. Yet I have come to distrust book jackets calculated to prick desire like a Bloomingdale’s window, as if you could wear what you read. The great French novels used to come in plain shiny yellow jackets, and the drab Modern Library uniforms hid the most lavish loot.

  Once in a while I take my castoffs down and turn their pages for exercise, stroke them a bit. They have the slightly dusty, forlorn patina of people seldom held or loved, while their neighbors stand upright with self-esteem, for having been known, partaken of intimacies. I am regretful, but my heart is hardened.

  I can face myself, abandoning even the most sanctified or stylish books, but there is forever the world to face, world without end. I envision a scenario: a group of writers sits around talking of the formative books, the great themes, let’s say man grappling with nature, with death. Perhaps they are women writers, musing on men’s compulsion to view everything in terms of struggle and mastery. One turns to me, saying, Well, for instance, Moby Dick?

  I cannot lie about reading. A remnant of holiness still clings. It would be tantamount to a devout Catholic’s claiming falsely to be in a state of grace. So I blush, confess I never finished it, and though they remain courteous, repressed shock and disapproval permeate the room (or could it be the women find me daring, the Emma Goldman of reading?).

  I puzzled for years over how a friend, frantically busy at a publishing job, where manuscripts are thrust at you daily for overnight perusal, had read every book ever mentioned. Colossal erudition, I thought in my innocence, and speedy too. Till it struck me, as it might a child suddenly seeing through Santa Claus: it can’t be. She lies. I wasn’t filled with indignation, didn’t even banish her from the ranks of the trustworthy. Simply: aha, so that’s what’s done, a helpful currency of social exchange like the white lie, and equally easy. You read reviews and jacket copy, and listen carefully. If you are reasonably au courant, who knows, you may even come up with critical judgments no less plausible or even valid than had you read the book. What has been lost, after all? Only the actual experience, the long slow being with the book, feeling the shape of the words, their roll and tumble in the ear.

  Still, lying about reading feels too risky, as risky as saying you have seen God or drunk the milk of Paradise when you haven’t—the kind of lie that might dilute the milk of Paradise should it ever be offered you.

  Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven’t tried. Among some tossed-out books of my daughters which I rescued, to shelter until a foster home could be arranged, was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn’t have to see it. Life imprisonment. Someday my children, going through my effects, will say, “Why did she keep this wretched thing? She hated it.” “Oh, you know what she was like. It was a book, after all.”

  To tell the truth, I had begun to think about reading before coming upon Mr. Cha. It was the spring of 1986, an uneasy time for me but a magnificent season for the New York Mets. As often happens with a new love or addiction, I didn’t know I cared until it was too late. I had never followed baseball and felt safe from television, one of the devil’s ploys to buy our souls. But alas we are never safe; in the midst of life we are in death, and so forth. My family watched the Mets. At first I would drift through the living room and glance, with faint contempt, at the screen. Gradually I would stand there for longer and longer spells, until I came to know the players by name and disposition and personal idiosyncrasies: how they spit and how they chewed, how they reacted to a failed at-bat—with impassivity or miming the ritual “darn-it” gestures—how their uniforms fit and which folds they tugged in moments of stress. The game itself I already knew in rudimentary form, having played punch ball on the summer evening streets of Brooklyn as the light fell behind the brick houses and the pink Spaldeen grew dimmer with each hopeful arc through the twilit air. All that remained was for the finer points to be explained to me. I was surprised and touched by the element of sacrifice, as in the sacrifice fly (the adjective evoking esprit de corps and a tenuous religiosity) and the bunt, a silly-looking play, several grown men converging to creep after a slowly and imperturbably rolling ball. I was impressed by the intricate comparative philosophy of relief pitching, and shocked by the logistics of stealing bases. This sounded illicit yet everyone took it for granted, like white-collar crime, with the most expert thieves held in high esteem like savvy Wall Street players. Then one evening—the turning point—I sat down, committing my body to the chair, my eyes to the screen, my soul to the national Oversoul.

  I pretended an anthropological detachment. My quest was for the subtleties and symbolism—the tension of the 3–2 call, the heartbreak of men left stranded on base, the managers’ farseeing calculations recalling the projections of chess players (if he does this, I’ll do that), the baffling streaks and slumps, and above all the mystifying signs. For at critical junctures, advisors sprinkled on the field or in the dugout would pat their chests and thighs and affect physical tics in a cabalistic language. Soon it was clear I wasn’t as detached as I pretended. The fortunes of the Mets, as well as the fluctuations of each individual Met, had come to matter. It was partly proximity, the sine qua non of most love, and partly aesthetics. When giraffe-like Darryl Strawberry lazily unfurled an arm to allow a fly ball to nestle in his glove, I felt the elation I used to feel watching André Eglevsky of the New York City Ballet leap and stay aloft so long it seemed he had forgotten what he owed to gravity. Not unlike the elation I got from books.

  I never watched an entire game, though. I hadn’t the patience. I would enter late, around the fourth or fifth inning, when the atmosphere was already set—not that it couldn’t change in an instant, that was part of the charm. I was like those drinkers who assure themselves they can stop any time they choose. I could start any time I chose. I was not compelled to scoot to my chair at the opening notes of the Star-Spangled Banner like a pitiful little iron filing within range of the magnet.

  Night after astounding night became a season of protracted ecstasy. It was not just the winning but the beauty of the plays and the flowering of each distinct personality: modest Mookie Wilson’s radiant amiability and knack of doing the right thing at the right moment, boyish Gary Carter’s packaged public-relations grin, Howard Johnson’s baffling lack of personality, absorbent like a potent black hole at the center of the team, Roger McDowell’s inanity, Bob Ojeda’s strong-jawed strength and the departures and returns of his mustache, Keith Hernandez’s smoldering and
handsome anger at the world, Len Dykstra’s rooted insecurities packed together to form a dense and lethal weapon, Dwight Gooden’s young inscrutability, reflecting the enigma of the team—arrogant or just ardent? All became crystallized.

  Amidst the glory was an unease, a tingling of an inner layer of skin. I grudged the hours. I felt forced to watch against my will. Yet what was the trouble? Watching baseball is harmless, unless compulsion itself be considered blameworthy—but I am not that stern a moralist.

  The games were depriving me of something. There it was. The instant I identified the uneasy feeling as “missing,” all came clear. Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. It was what I used to do through long evenings. Never mornings—even to one so self-indulgent, it seems slightly sinful to wake up and immediately sit down with a book—and afternoons only now and then. In daylight I would pay what I owed the world. Reading was the reward, a solitary, obscure, nocturnal reward. It was what I got everything else (living) out of the way in order to do. Now the lack was taking its toll. I was having withdrawal symptoms.

  I tried to give up baseball. I cut back, backslid, struggled the well-documented struggle. And then, abruptly, my efforts were needless. The burden fell from my shoulders as Zen masters say the load of snow falls from the bent bamboo branch at the moment of greatest tension, effortlessly. The Mets won the World Series and overnight, baseball was no more.

  Had my struggle taken place eight years later, the much decried baseball strike would have snatched my burden from me in a more cruelly abrupt, un-Zen-like way. How many people suffered through nearly two years of baseball’s defection, bitter and bereft, seeking other pastimes that would yield the same forgetfulness, the same sense of wandering companionably with like-minded dreamers through a green and grassy myth? They watched movies and game shows, they took up aerobics, they switched their allegiance to basketball or hockey (some may even have turned to reading). But, they reported, none of these felt quite the same.