Reading in an age of melting ice

On the separation of information and experience

Kajikazawa in Kai Province (Kōshū Kajikazawa), Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830-32

If only I could just press this book to my temple and absorb it…

One occasionally hears (or overhears) this at the bookshop. It has always struck me as a peculiar thing to say, a peculiar and poignant way to feel. It’s confusing: Why, when reading is an experience, would we want to skip it? Maybe it’s not that we want to skip it, per se, but to condense or otherwise intensify it. But what is narrative intensity¹ without attentional participation—without concentration? How can we hope to know something without feeling it?

When we pick up a book, we hold in our hands an object of great philosophical bounty, but the bounty is bound by language, and language is inseparable from the process of thought itself. Here, we sense, is two-pronged bedevilment: 1) meaning is wedded to the word—to free one is to destroy the other, to break the vow;² and 2) in the literary encounter, there is no way to circumvent one’s own mind, one’s participation in the greater habit of thought that describes awareness.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
       So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
       And the harvest’s done.³

Our time and matter as individuals on this planet are limited, and the obvious expanse of time and matter beyond individual experience makes our personal limits look rather stark. It’s a fearful reality, and fear motivates a great many strange and ambitious actions. Yet no corollary for bounty that we can experience—speed, space, wealth, fame—is any match for the magnitude of generations, epochs, and aeons.

Anyone’s close family and friends composes a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, a group invisible, at whose loss the world will not blink. Two million children die a year from diarrhea, and 800,000 from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed 1 million Cambodians, the flue epidemic of 1918 killed 21 or 22 million people… shall this go on? Or do you suffer, as Teilhard de Chardin did, the sense of being ‘an atom lost in the universe’? Or do you not suffer this sense? How about what journalists call ‘compassion fatigue’? Reality fatigue? At what limit for you do other individuals blur? Vanish? How old are you?

I’ve never read anyone who questions our place in the world—who destabilizes understanding—as intensely as Annie Dillard in For the Time Being⁴ (above). Not, that is, until recently, when I happened upon Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey.⁵ The former is concerned with time and existence, the latter with poetry, which is to say that they are different approaches to the same subject. They are both writings that rely heavily on readings—of de Chardin and the Baal Shem Tov, of Dickinson and Kafka and many others.

But what really brings them closest to one another, to my mind, is humor: Dillard and Ruefle are both devastatingly funny. People who ask difficult questions can’t help but be funny, because good questions always verge on the absurd. The difference between the two writers is that when arriving at absurdity, Ruefle often implicates herself, softening the blow for the rest of us, whereas Dillard simply points at the void and, keeping a straight face, dares us not to fall in.

Here’s Mary Ruefle reflecting on something that makes many readers anxious, or hopeless, or compulsive: the number of books one is likely to read over the course of one’s life.

I can calculate that I have probably read 2,400 books in my life, which may well be more than people read on average, but in light of all the books there actually are, or in light of even another fact—that in the year 2000, 200,000 books were published—it is a raindrop (though a very human one). Out of those 2,400 books I probably remember two hundred, or 8 percent. If asked to list them, I might not even get that far. What I want to know is: is all this proportional, or does it reach some point where it no longer is? In other words, if someone has read sixty books in his life, can he remember them all, or only five of them? And is there anyone out there who has read only six books and forgotten them all? Doesn’t that seem unlikely? Am I a superfluous person because I have read more than I can possibly process, like an intake of food the body doesn’t need, or am I a superfluous person because I have gone out and bought myself a new calculator?

There’s something genius about Ruefle’s last pair of questions, something resembling the grammar of an answer—absolution, salvation, the secret—to all the above questions and the peculiar wish that inspired them. The genius is this: I am a superfluous person either way.

To be superfluous is to be “unnecessary, especially through being more than enough,” and literally means overflowing.⁶ Earth, as Dillard makes clear, has been overflowing with people⁷ for some time. Ruefle and Dillard are thinking about natural limits, what it takes to breach them—gluttony, money, technology—or balance them—disaster, grief, love. They are wondering when enough is enough.

Maybe the desire to download a book directly to one’s brain is the same as earth’s desire to download us directly into its sod. But something stymies this desire—bashes against it like Kafka’s ax hacking away at the frozen sea.⁸ “It is time pounding at you, time,” Dillard writes in An American Childhood. “Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

The water is so cold it takes your breath away. Fortunately, there is more where it came from.

1. By narrative, I mean literary knowing; recounting, recitation, and telling—the bases of narration—all proceed from acquaintance. And intensity is a matter of focus, intense being an adjective derived from the verb intend, meaning “direct one’s attention” or, literally, “stretch toward.” Stretching toward, I feel, is different from stretching out (re: extend) because toward prefigures a likeness in opposition—a reflection.

2. “Vow comes from the middle English vowe, which is from vou, from Old French, from Latin votum: vote. Vote comes from the neuter past participle of vovere: to vow. Also to he enjoyed: the playful association with vowel from Middle English vowelle, from Old French vouel, from Latin vocalis: sounding, from vox, vocis, voice. By my own skewed associational mathematics. Vow = Voice. I vote always for the transforming of language’s energv side with a full voice.” Anne Waldman, Vow to Poetry (Coffee House, 2001)

3. John Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A Ballad” (1819)

4. Vintage Books, 1999

5. Wave Books, 2012

6. from Latin super- ‘over’ + fluere ‘to flow’

7. “‘The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1,’ a demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, wrote in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan. ‘Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth run from 70 billion to 100 billion.’ Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. We living people now number 5.8 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living.”

8. “Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”