Following this pendular motion that rules our intellectual life, one question seems to tick away repeatedly, addressed both to the reader who despairs at the lack of time and to the society of readers who despair at the lack of space: to what purpose do we read? What is the reason for wanting to know more, for reaching towards the ever-retreating horizon of our intellectual exploring? Why collect the booty of such adventures in the vaults of our stone libraries and in our electronic memories? Why do it at all? The question asked by the keen futurologist can be deepened, and rather than wonder, Why is reading coming to an end? (a self-fulfilling assumption), we might ask instead, What is the end of reading?
Perhaps a personal example may help us examine the question.
Two weeks before Christmas 2008, I was told that I needed an urgent operation, so urgent in fact that I had no time to pack. I found myself lying in a pristine emergency room, uncomfortable and anxious, with no books except the one I had been reading that morning, Cees Nooteboom’s delightful In the Dutch Mountains, which I finished in the next few hours. To spend the following fourteen days convalescing in a hospital without any reading material seemed to me a torture too great to bear, so when my partner suggested getting from my library a few books, I seized the opportunity gratefully. But which books did I want?
The author of Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger have taught us that for everything there is a season; likewise, I might add, for every season there is a book. But readers have learned that not just any book is suited to any occasion. Pity the soul who finds itself with the wrong book in the wrong place, like poor Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, whose book bag sank under the ice, so that he was constrained to read, night after freezing night, the only surviving volume: Dr. John Gauden’s indigestible Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Readers know that there are books for reading after lovemaking and books for waiting in the airport lounge, books for the breakfast table and books for the bathroom, books for sleepless nights at home and books for sleepless days in the hospital. No one, not even the best of readers, can fully explain why certain books are right for certain occasions and why others are not. In some ineffable way, like human beings, occasions and books mysteriously agree or clash with one another.
Why, at certain moments in our life, do we choose the companionship of one book over another? The list of titles Oscar Wilde requested in Reading Gaol included Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a French-Italian conversation primer. Alexander the Great went on his campaigns with a copy of Homer’s Iliad. John Lennon’s murderer thought it fit to carry J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when planning to commit his crime. Do astronauts take Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles on their journeys or, on the contrary, do they prefer André Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres? During Mr. Bernard Madoff’s prison sentence, will he demand Dickens’s Little Dorrit to read about how the embezzler Mr. Merdle, unable to bear the shame of being found out, cut his throat with a borrowed razor? Pope Benedict XIII, will he retire to his studiolo in the Castello Sant’Angelo with a copy of Bubu de Montparnasse, by CharlesLouis Philippe, to study how the lack of condoms provoked a syphilis epidemic in nineteenth-century Paris? The practical G. K. Chesterton imagined that if stranded on a desert island he would want to have with him a simple shipbuilding manual; under the same circumstances, the less practical Jules Renard preferred Voltaire’s Candide and Schiller’s Die Räuber.
And I, what books would I choose best to keep me company in my hospital cell?
Though I believe in the obvious usefulness of a virtual library, I’m not a user of e-books, those modern incarnations of the Assyrian tablets, nor of the Lilliputian iPods, nor the nostalgic Game Boys. I believe, as Ray Bradbury put it, that “the Internet is a big distraction.” I’m accustomed to the space of a page and the solid flesh of paper and ink. I made therefore a mental inventory of the books piled by my bed at home. I discarded recent fiction (too risky because yet unproven), biographies (too crowded under my circumstances: hooked to a tangle of drips, I found other people’s presence in my room annoying), scientific essays and detective novels (too cerebraclass="underline" much as I’d recently been enjoying the Darwinian renaissance and rereading classic crime stories, I felt that a detailed account of selfish genes and the criminal mind would not be the right medicine). I toyed with the idea of startling the nurses with Kierkegaard’s Pain and Suffering: The Sickness unto Death. But no: what I wanted was the equivalent of comfort food, something I had once enjoyed and could repeatedly and effortlessly revisit, something that could be read for pleasure alone but that would, at the same time, keep my brain alight and humming. I asked my partner to bring me my two volumes of Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Lars Gustafsson, in his moving novel Death of a Beekeeper, has his narrator, Lars Lennart Westin, who is dying of cancer, make a list of art forms according to their level of difficulty. Foremost are the erotic arts, followed by music, poetry, drama, and pyrotechnics, and ending with the arts of building fountains, fencing, and artillery. But one art form cannot be fitted in: the art of bearing pain. “We are therefore dealing with a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high,” says Westin, “that no one exists who can practice it.” Westin, perhaps, had not read Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, I discovered with relief, the perfect choice for bearing pain. Opening it almost anywhere while waiting to be prodded and pinched and drugged, I found that the friendly voice of the erudite Spanish soldier comforted me with its reassurance that all would be well in the end. Because ever since my adolescence I’ve kept going back to Don Quixote, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped up by the prodigious surprises of its plot. And since Don Quixote is a book that can be read just for the pleasure of its invention, simply for the sake of the story, without any obligation of studiously analyzing its conundrums and rhetorical digressions, I could allow myself to drift peacefully away in the narrative flow, following the noble knight and his faithful Sancho. To my first high school reading of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have, over the years, added many other readings, in all sorts of places and all sorts of moods. I read Don Quixote during my early years in Europe, when the echoes of May 1968 seemed to announce huge changes into something still unnamed and undefined, like the idealized world of chivalry that the honest knight seeks on his quest. I read Don Quixote in the South Pacific, trying to raise a family on an impossibly small budget, feeling a little mad in the alien Polynesian culture, like the poor knight among the aristocrats. I read Don Quixote in Canada, where the country’s multicultural society seemed to me appealingly quixotic in tone and style. To these readings, and many others, I can now add a medicinal Don Quixote, both as a balm and a consolation.