Ruined By Reading Read online

  I was never a true devotee, just on a brief vacation, or aberration. I doubt that I would have suffered much, but I shall never know. Anyway, by then the team I loved, the names and the personalities—or personas—attached to them were gone. The Mets, as far as I was concerned, were no longer the Mets. Over and over I have been puzzled by the ruthless trading of players and the players’ own promiscuity. How can you still root for a team, I’ve asked true fans, when the members change every year? Over and over I’ve been told it’s the team that grips a fan’s affections, not its individual components. But the team is an abstraction, a uniform, a logo, a pair of colors. The players are what matter, just as you cannot substitute paraphrased chapters for Pride and Prejudice, say, or The Golden Bowl, telling the same story in different words, and call it the same book.

  In any case, my swift and troubling affair with baseball ended painlessly. The dramatic victory of the Series over, I returned to reading, to my life. Or was it to a retreat from life, the void at the center, from which, the Zen masters also say, all being springs?

  How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself—the task of a lifetime—becomes the answer. Which brings Mr. Cha back to mind. He knows what to do with his life. He treasures his free mind, or that part of it that Shunryu Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, calls “big mind,” as opposed to the small mind concerned with particular daily events:

  The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. This mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there… . True mind is watching mind. You cannot say, “This is my self, my small mind, or my limited mind, and that is big mind.” That is limiting yourself, restricting your true mind, objectifying your mind. Bodhidharma said, “In order to see a fish you must watch the water.” Actually when you see water you see the true fish.

  But some of us must see the fish in order to see the water. The water may be too transparent to grasp without varieties of fish to show its texture.

  A poet friend of mine, after heart surgery, was advised by a nurse to take up meditation to reduce stress. “You must empty your mind,” she said. “I’ve spent my life filling it,” he replied. “How can you expect me to empty it?” The argument is verbal. In Buddhist paradoxes, empty can mean full and full, empty, in relation to mind and universe. Either way, though, I keep worrying about those fish, flickering beautiful things of this world. A pity if they were to become only means to an end, to a serene mind.

  In The Ambassadors, mild, restrained Strether is sent to Paris to extricate a young man from his passion, and instead falls prey to the same passion. In a whirlwind of exhilaration he exhorts everyone around him to live. “To live, to live!” Very heady. Though not so, apparently, to Henry Mills Alden of Harper’s Publishers, who rejected Henry James’s manuscript when it was first presented: “The scenario is interesting,” he wrote in his report,

  but it does not promise a popular novel. The tissues of it are too subtly fine for general appreciation. It is subjective, fold within fold of a complex mental web, in which the reader is lost if his much-wearied attention falters. A good proportion of the characters are American, but the scene is chiefly in Paris. The story (in its mere plot) centres about an American youth in Paris, who has been captivated by a charming French woman (separated from her husband) and the critical situations are developed in connection with the efforts of his friends and relatives to rescue him. The moral in the end is that he is better off in this captivity than in the conditions to which his friends would restore him.

  I do not advise acceptance. We ought to do better.

  Luckily for us, the fine-tissued novel did eventually gain the sanction of print and hard covers, between which “To live!” becomes the awakened Strether’s motto, the Jamesian equivalent of a bumper sticker. Was I living, I wondered when I first read it, or simply reading? Were books the world, or at least a world? How could I “live” when there was so much to be read that ten lives could not be enough? And what is it, anyway, this “living”? Have I ever done it? If it is merely James’s euphemism for knowing passion, well, I pass. Reading is not a disabling affliction. I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now? For if “living” means indulging the cravings, why then …

  There was life before reading. Not until the sixteenth century were manuscripts even available, except to monks and royalty. What could it have been like? There was life before language too—grunts and grimaces, tears and laughter (yet how much laughter, without language?), shrieks and groans and commiseration; all of that is easy to imagine. But to have language and no books? What to do after the corn is ground and the water hauled and the butter churned? Keep your mind free, as Mr. Cha suggests? Without stories to free the mind, emptiness might be true emptiness, like Freud’s proverbial cigar. Well, there were storytellers, the old woman sitting at the fireside entrancing the family, or the troubadour chanting verses near the fountain in the piazza while women walked from the village oven with warm breads on boards balanced on their shoulders. But that is a social experience. With books there are no fellow listeners, no fleshly storyteller, none of the exertions of fellowship.

  Historians contrast the unity and coherence of the Middle Ages with modern social fragmentation: among the hundreds of causes for the change might be numbered the privatization of stories—from a communal activity, listeners bound together by words that gathered them in and made their dreams audible—to a solitary voice whispering in your ear.

  Today, in an odd quirk of history, public readings once again are enjoying a heyday, if not in the town square then in the corner bookstore or library or art gallery, the café or the park. Everyone, it seems, is writing something, prose or poetry, and everyone wants to read it aloud. We wring our hands collectively—and with good reason—over the impending death of the book at the hands of electronics, over widespread illiteracy and semiliteracy, and yet plenty of people will come to hear others read. How this can be seems a paradox, but no doubt history could show even more wildly polarized trends flourishing side by side.

  Still, today’s audiences are not seeking quite the same thing as their ancient counterparts. The troubadours, the golden-tongued grandmothers and village schoolmasters were prized for the wonder of their stories. They were the only source of stories. Now listeners come, I suspect, not so much to hear as to see the storyteller, in a spirit of celebrating celebrity itself. A curious cultishness has come to surround the writer—I think of how Dickens and Wilde crossed the ocean and strode down the gangplank to the roar of cheering crowds—as if the stories and the writer were one and the same.

  But you cannot see or touch a voice. That is what makes it mysterious and subtle and endlessly alluring. And without the voices of my youth, my ghostly familiars, how could I have become myself?

  I READ at an early age, three and a half. The girl upstairs taught me. Late afternoons, we stood at the blackboard in her hallway and she drew signs that were the same, but in another sensory costume, as the words that came from our lips. Once I grasped the principle of conversion, that airy puffs of voice could have a visual counterpart, the rest, what teachers call “breaking the code,” was routine.

  The world existed to be read and I read it. Diamond Crystal Kosher Coarse Salt on the cylindrical container my mother shook over simmering pots, and Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. on every box and can, had the rhythms of the pounding verses the bigger girls chanted out on the street, twirling their jump ropes. Before I knew who I was or what I might be, I became the prodigy, the “reader.” When friends visited, my father would summon me and hand me the New York Times, his finger aimed at the lead story. “Read that.” I read, though those signs had no meaning. Sometimes the guests
refused to be convinced, suspecting I had been coached like the big winners on radio quiz shows. So my father would invite them to test me with any article on any page. No four-year-old could have memorized the entire paper. And while they marveled at my freakish achievement, which seemed to exist apart from my physical being, I could return to my paper dolls.

  If my usefulness and value to my parents lay in this power to amaze, then I had to keep doing it. Reading was the ticket that entitled me to my place in the world. But in school there were other bright children. Soon everyone could read. My ticket was fraying, sadly devalued, and I felt something like the panic Samson must have felt, shorn. What can we do once we are ordinary? The choice of hair for Samson’s strength is not as arbitrary or peculiar as I once thought. If your identity rests in special powers, you shiver without them, naked to the wind whipping at the back of your neck.

  It was too late to fashion another ticket and besides, I didn’t have the means: irresistible charm or beauty or athletic prowess or saintliness. Could I just be here, of no special use at all, simply by having been born? I envied my blithe peers who didn’t seem to be paying any stiff admission fee. I still do. When I stand on a platform and speak, I envy the audience who need only listen. My father’s ghost is at my shoulder, his gaze not on me but on the guests. With a swift jerk of the head he chuckles and says, Just get a load of this.

  Because I read when I could still believe in magic, reading was magical, not merely breaking a code or translating one set of symbols into another. The idea of translatability was itself magical, and so it remains. Semiotics, before it became a formal branch of study, was the sleight-of-hand way of the world: signs and things, things and signs, layered, sometimes jumbled, partners in a dance of allusion.

  But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them. I undervalued the other senses. I wrote of the disproportion in a story about my father, “The Two Portraits of Rembrandt,” but it goes for me too.

  He lived by the word. Pictures were a crude, provisional mode of representation and communication, happily supplanted by the advent of language. People who still looked at pictures for information were in a pre-verbal state, babies or Neanderthals. The Daily News, “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” was a publication designed for the illiterate… . Likewise, Life Magazine, which prided itself on its photography; he would not have it in the house… .

  Maybe it was their limitation and finiteness that he disliked about pictures. He loved what was bountiful and boundless and hated anything mean and narrow… . Pictures were circumscribed by their frames. A house, a tree, a cloud, added up to a landscape, and that was the end of it. The space of pictures is inner space, but he didn’t look into, he looked at. Words, though, could go on forever, linear, one opening the door to a dozen others, each new one nudging at another door, and so on to infinite mansions of meditation. Nor was there any limit to what you could say; words bred more words, spawned definition, comparison, analogy. A picture is worth a thousand words, I was told in school. Confucius. But to me, too, the value seemed quite the other way around. And why not ten thousand, a hundred thousand? Give me a picture and I could provide volumes. Meanings might be embedded in the picture, but only words could release them and at the same time, at the instant they were born and borne from the picture, seize them, give them shape and specific gravity. Nothing was really possessed or really real until it was incarnate in words. Show and Tell opened every school day, but I rarely cared to show anything. You could show forever, but how could you be sure the essence had been transmitted, without words? Words contained the knowledge, words were the knowledge, the logos, and words verified that the knowledge was there.

  My father’s scorn was so powerful that I never looked at a picture—really looked—until I was in college. To satisfy a requirement, I took a survey course in art history and spent three class hours a week in the dark, being shown slides. The young instructor evidently found it natural and useful to brood in the dark over the intricacies of pictures; his devotion gradually dislodged my learned or inherited contempt. I saw that pictures, too, could be read, that everything in them was a sign, just as words and phrases were signs. The picture was its own kind of story, with each line and brush stroke, each color and placement of an object bearing the narrative along; they had been selected from an infinity of choices, put there on purpose, and they added up.

  Why do you think the painter put those broken eggs right there? the teacher asked. What do they do to the space they occupy? To the space around them? Why the ruined castle in the background? Or the splotch of red up in the corner? Instinctively I had asked the same questions about words in books. My thoughts had shaped themselves aurally, through the sounds of the words. Meanwhile I had looked at paintings and photographs the way I looked at anything in my line of sight—a tree, a house, a traffic light—as if it were simply there: the given. Now I began to see, and to think through seeing. It dawned on me that a picture was something made, that the wonder of it, beyond any particular beauty or skill of execution, was that it existed at all, that it had overcome and overlaid blank nothingness, as words convert a blank page into the bearer of a story. (A house or a traffic light is made too, with its own felicities or failures of design, as I eventually came to see. As far as a tree, only God can make one, as Joyce Kilmer told us in the poem we were forced to memorize in grade school—how the boys cackled at “the earth’s sweet loving breast.” Everything in the world may be construed as a triumph over nothingness. Or better still, as a manifestation of Shunryu Suzuki’s “big mind”: “True mind is watching mind.”)

  Above all, there was the pure visual pleasure a picture could give, a pleasure beyond what might be read in it. This pleasure the instructor did not discuss; perhaps it was obvious to everyone but me. Yes, it must have been: after all, I never expected or needed my music history professor to point out that a passage was beautiful. I took that for granted. I heard it.

  The pleasure of looking came slowly, and I have not yet learned it through and through. Possibly no sensory pleasure that we haven’t felt at least dimly in childhood is ever thoroughly our own. (If we have not enjoyed our bodies as infants and children, for instance, can we appreciate eroticism as adults? Is such a deprivation possible?) Nowadays, looking at a picture, I am now and then speared by a sharp joy in the eyes, and I know this must be what art lovers perpetually feel: the pure ecstatic shudder of the retina, which is so rarely given to me. Even when it is, I must acknowledge that my tastes, still childlike, run to the “pretty.” Color and design delight me (Matisse and Monet), and composition too (Cézanne and Michelangelo). Well, why on earth not? They ask no special acuity of the viewer. Of course these are sophisticated artists, and by conscious effort I have learned what makes them sophisticated, but what I enjoy about them is the primitive feeling of visual “rightness,” as in a sonata’s harmonious chord resolution. Too often I’ve turned away from paintings that are harsh, troubling, downright “ugly,” or else pale and muted—all of them pictures that better eyes than mine perceive as excellent. And this shrinking from the difficult, the inharmonious, and the subtle is precisely what irks me in readers who complain that a book is “too depressing” or “too demanding,” too long or complicated. No way to explain that a book’s merit has nothing to do with its degree of good cheer, or that a “depressing” book can give exquisite pleasure. I suspect that to take a similar pleasure in “unpretty” paintings, I would have to have been born with different genes, or been taught at an early age to love the act of seeing.

  Incidentally, living by the word, by organized series of words, which is narrative, is a handicap when it comes to operating modern electronic devices like telephone answering machines or VCRs (not to mention computers and the phantasmagoric reaches of E-mail). Such ineptness is not due, as laughing children suppose, to quaintness or premature senility. It is simply that
readers are accustomed to receiving information in the narrative mode. A row of minimally labeled buttons means nothing if the nerve paths aren’t trained for it. True, the machines come with instructions, but those hover near the borderline of language, closer to the pulsating fragments of rock and roll, a different semiotics entirely. The teenagers laugh at their parents, while it is we who should be laughing at them, except that the loss of language is a somber joke. When my younger daughter translates the manuals into narrative form I too can make the machines work: “Instructions for a happy VCR: Turn TV switch on. Turn VCR switch on. Watch little red button light up. Keep VCR on while doing all the rest of this. Little red button should stay lit.” I feel the familiar comfort of language performing its original task. If those of us who live by language become superfluous in years to come, it will not be because of the advance of technology, but the loss of coherent discourse.

  IT started—my reading, that is—innocently enough, and then it infiltrated. It didn’t replace living; it infused it, till the two became inextricable, like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen in a bead of water. To part them could take violent and possibly lethal means, a spiritual electrolysis.

  I read whatever I found in the house. It was an age of sets, and several were stored in the bedroom I inherited when I was ten and my sister left to get married. Dickens in brown leather with a black horizontal stripe was cozy looking, but the Harvard Classics in black leather and gold trim were forbidding—especially Plutarch’s Lives and Marcus Aurelius and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. I did manage to find one, though, volume 17, containing all the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, which I practically licked off the page. They tasted bitter and pungent, like curries. The most bittersweet story, exotic yet familiar, was “The Little Mermaid,” and rereading it today, I can easily see why. Like me, the “silent and thoughtful” mermaid lusted after the world. No matter how ravishing and secure the undersea realm she shared with her five loving sisters, the world way above lured her from her earliest years. She craved light, the great ball of the sun that beneath the water’s surface was translated into a purple glow. And she craved people, in all their splendor: “Fonder and fonder she became of human beings, more and more she longed for their company. Their world seemed to her to be so much larger than her own.”