The followers of the faiths feel no such inhibitions. For Jews, the ritual of reading aloud the Five Books of Moses, two sections at a time, on a Monday and a Thursday, has lain at the heart of their religion since the end of the Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. On the twenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the holiday of Simchat Torah marks the end of one read-through of the Books and the start of the next, with the final section of Deuteronomy and the first of Genesis being recited back to back. The congregant who has been assigned to read Deuteronomy 34:1–12 is quaintly designated the Chatan Torah (‘bridegroom of the Torah’), while the one in charge of reading Genesis 1 is referred to as the Chatan Bereshit (‘bridegroom of Genesis’). We secular types may think we love books, but how lacklustre our attachment must seem compared with that of the two bridegrooms who make seven circuits around the synagogue, chanting out their joy and beseeching God, ‘Hoshiah na’ (‘Deliver us’) while the other members of the congregation wave flags, kiss one another and shower sweets on all the children present. How regrettable that when we turn the final page of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, our own society would consider us peculiar indeed if we went on to compete for the honour of being the bridegroom of Swann’s Way (Chatan Bereshit shel betzad shel Swann).
5.
Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman or Marcus Aurelius. Moved though we may be by Leaves of Grass or the Meditations, we deny that there might be any need, if we wish these books to have a genuine influence on our lives, of revisiting them daily. We are more alarmed by the potentially asphyxiating effects of being compelled to have structured encounters with ideas than by the notion that we might otherwise be in danger of forgetting them altogether.
But forget them we do. The modern world is dense with stimuli, of which none is more insistent than that torrent which we capture with the term ‘news’. This entity occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one, its main dispatches tracking the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have here been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, and vespers into the evening report.
The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. The earth must therefore be latticed with fibre-optic cables, the waiting rooms of its airports filled with monitors and the public squares of cities ribboned with the chase of stock prices.
For religions, by contrast, there is seldom any need to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across handheld screens. For 1.6 billion Buddhists, there has been no news of world-altering significance since 483 BC. For their Christian counterparts, the critical events of history came to a close around Easter Sunday in AD 30, while for the Jews the line was drawn a little after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in AD 70.
Even if we do not concur with the specific messages that religions schedule for us, we can still concede that we have paid a price for our promiscuous involvement with novelty. We occasionally sense the nature of our loss at the end of an evening, as we finally silence the television after watching a report on the opening of a new railway or the tetchy conclusion to a debate over immigration and realize that — in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political perfection — we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of quieter truths which we know about in theory and forget to live by in practice.
6.
Our peculiar approach to culture spills over from education into associated fields. Comparably suspect assumptions are rife, for example, in the manufacture and sale of books.
Here too we are presented with infinitely more material than we can ever assimilate and we struggle to hold on to what matters most to us. A moderately industrious undergraduate pursuing a degree in the humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century might run through 800 books before graduation day; by comparison, a wealthy English family in 1250 would have counted itself fortunate to have three books in its possession, this modest library consisting of a Bible, a collection of prayers and a compendium of lives of the saints — these nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.
We are often urged to celebrate not only that there are so many books to hand, but also that they are so inexpensive. Yet neither of these circumstances should necessarily be deemed unambiguous advantages. The costly and painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible — revealed in the illuminated flowers in the margins, the naive drawings of Jonah and the whale and the brilliant blue skies dotted with exotic birds above the Virgin — was the product of a society which accepted containment as the basis for immersion, and which wished to elevate individual books into objects of extraordinary beauty so as to emphasize their spiritual and moral significance.
Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity. We can revere the care that goes into making a Jewish Sefer Torah, the sacred scroll of the Pentateuch, a copy of which will take a single scribe a year and a half to write out by hand, on a parchment made from the hide of a ceremonially slaughtered goat which has been soaked for nine days in a rabbinically prepared mixture of apple juice, saltwater and gall nuts. We should be prepared to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for volumes that would proclaim, through the weight and heft of their materials, the grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.
A book which cost as much as a house: an illuminated vellum page from a late-fifteenth-century prayer book, depicting the Adoration of the Magi. (illustration credit 4.13)
iii. Spiritual Exercises
1.
Alongside setting alternative curricula for universities and emphasizing the need to rehearse and digest knowledge, religions have also been radical in taking education out of the classroom and combining it with other activities, encouraging their followers to learn through all of their senses, not only by listening and reading but also, and more broadly, by doing: eating, drinking, bathing, walking and singing.