Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (25 page)

I lived for that whole summer with Herzen; he was my constant companion, even when I was not reading him. If I was out to dinner with friends, I would find myself thinking, “Who
are
these people? I want to be back with my
real
friends, Herzen and Natalie. I want to know what happens to them next.” This is a little sick, but any avid reader will recognize the symptoms. One of my closest friends excused herself early from a dinner at my house by saying she had to get home to read
The Maias
, and I know exactly how she felt. For those of us in the midst of a good book, the characters’ fates hang in the balance
now
. It matters to us not one whit that they were already fixed on the page a hundred years ago.

A digital-book proponent might point out that my Herzen experience would have been a lot more flexible and relaxed if I had managed to acquire the book on my iPad. I would not have been restricted to those moments when I happened to be seated in my well-lit, comfortable chair at home. The entire four volumes would have been lightweight, portable, and easy to read in out-of-the-way places such as subways, airplanes, cafés, or the living rooms of my friends’ houses. I could even have read it in bed, without the assistance of a reading light and without straining my wrists or spreading dust on the bedsheets. While I read, I could have used earphones to listen to any background music I chose. And besides all this, I would have been able to interrupt my reading at any time to check email, or look at headline news, or do whatever else I might need to do at any hour of the day or night. The book and my regular life could have been completely integrated.

But that, you see, would be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. All the pluses of portability and multifunctionality are, to a certain kind of reader, simply undesirable distractions. Alexander Herzen resided, for me, in a specific place that summer, and whenever I retreated to that place, I was alone with him. This (in addition to his great writing style, his keen mind, and his remarkable material) is what made the experience of reading him so intimate, so immersive. I sat for hours doing nothing but reading. I didn’t care about what was in my email inbox. I didn’t care about breaking news.

I am not going to natter on here about the distractability of the high-tech generation and the youthful inability to focus. That is not my point. We are all distractable. And reading has its own kind of distraction already built into it, as I learned (or was reminded) when I went to buy my first iPad.

I was having the new device set up for me at the store, which took more than an hour of intensive consultation. About halfway through this process, the smart young Applewoman who was helping me with the setup wondered what I might want to do with the iPad besides the obvious functions of checking email and surfing the web. Read newspapers and magazines, I suggested. Write short things when I’m away from my computer. Listen to all the music I have stored up on my iPod. And read books. “In fact,” I added enthusiastically, “I guess now I can listen to my music and read a digital book at the same time, when I’m on a long airplane flight or something.”

She nodded in a friendly way, and then told me that she actually preferred to use her own iPad to listen to audio books. “It’s easier for me to concentrate if I’m listening,” she explained. “When I read with my eyes, sometimes I find that my mind drifts and I have to reread the same sentence over again to find out what it means.”

I looked at her for a second in silence. “That’s how reading works,” I said.

*   *   *

In my more broad-minded moments, I am willing to acknowledge that there is no inherent difference between reading from a printed page and reading from an electronic device. It just depends on what you are used to. Those of us who have grown up reading bound books will miss them if they disappear, not because printed books are objectively preferable, but because we will feel deprived of something we care about. Daniel Kahneman, in his book
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, writes intelligently about the difference between gaining something and losing something. It turns out that people are, as he puts it, “loss averse”—that is, we are more likely to make a decision that allows us to keep something we already have than to gamble on something that, in economic terms, is equally valuable. Before Kahneman demonstrated this through a variety of psychological experiments, economists had pretty much assumed that all such choices were made on purely rational grounds, dollar for dollar, benefit for benefit. But Kahneman showed that whereas Econs (his term for the mythical beings who populate economic theory) would always choose according to the exact mathematical odds, Humans valued what they already possessed over what might be gained, and therefore slanted their risk-taking decisions toward retention rather than acquisition. So for me, for any of us, to want to keep our physical books on our physical bookshelves is not necessarily a sign that we are Luddites. It just means that we are Humans rather than Econs.

Robert Pinsky has written a poem called “Book” that celebrates, in part, this old-fashioned attachment to the physical object. It was originally composed as part of a series called
First Things to Hand
, a collection of poems about the various objects that the poet could reach out and touch with one hand while he was sitting at his desk. From the poem’s opening lines, the tactility of the actual book—its feel, its physical presence, its riffled pages that “brush my fingertips with their edges”—is primary. But this first sensation gradually modulates in the course of the poem into something else, something more abstract and metaphorical, something more to do with spirit or essence. So, about halfway through, the poet alludes to the “reader’s dread of finishing a book, that loss of a world,” along with an opposite dread, the fear of becoming “Hostage to a new world, to some spirit or spirits unknown.” It is a vision of reading which reminds us that even the thing to hand, beloved as it may be, is secondary to the voice it stands in for, that absent speaker who might once have declaimed his lines aloud but who now speaks only to our inner ear, reachable through the eye alone. And though the poem returns intermittently to the touchable object and its physical qualities (“The jacket ripped, the spine cracked, / Still it arouses me”), it ends by invoking the intangible. Or rather, it ends with a transubstantiation that mingles the two:

And the passion to make a book—passion of the writer

Smelling glue and ink, sensuous. The writer’s dread of making

Another tombstone, my marker orderly in its place in the stacks.

Or to infiltrate and inhabit another soul, as a splinter of spirit

Pressed between pages like a wildflower, odorless, brittle.

Reading this poem, I wondered at first if it would be meaningless to future generations who had read only electronic books. What would they make of those cracked spines, those smells, those pages? Then I realized that, unless history disappears along with books, the meaning of this poem will remain accessible, just as that cartoon about scrolls makes sense to us even if we have never actually seen an ancient scroll. The poem itself could even be part of what helps transmit the past (that is, our present) to the future. In that as-yet-unimaginable time when the visceral pleasures Pinsky describes are all gone, some “splinter” of them will remain in the “odorless, brittle” form of the poet’s reported experience.

Such losses happen all the time in literature, and yet we readers manage to transcend them; we manage to continue getting the joke, despite the disappearance of the circumstances that gave rise to it. I’m thinking now of an actual joke that occurs in the pages of
Don Quixote
, somewhere near the beginning of Volume Two. In order to understand the joke, you have to know that eleven years passed between the publication of the first volume and the appearance of this second one in 1615, and that during the intervening decade, the knight and his adventures became famous throughout Spain. But you don’t have to know this before you start reading, because Volume Two tells you this in its opening pages. Everyone Don Quixote meets in the second book has heard of him already, and all these new fans are anxious to see him do something foolish and chivalric before their very eyes. He has become the hero of his own novel in a setting that is supposedly outside that novel. The lunatic knight accepts this as nothing more than his due, but the practical, earthy Sancho Panza finds the existence of two selves, the “book” self and the “real” self, confusing and disturbing. He is especially perturbed by one interlocutor, Sansón Carrasco, who insists on grilling him about the disappearance and then inexplicable reappearance of the ass he was riding in Part One. Eventually Sancho just throws up his hands: “‘I don’t know what answer to give you,’ said Sancho, ‘except that the one who wrote the story must have made a mistake, or else it must be due to carelessness on the part of the printer.’”

To have a character in a novel talk about that novel’s printing errors when print was relatively new must have been a startling and witty thing to do. But it seems to me that this line has remained just as startling and witty over the course of four centuries. The joke lies, of course, in the character’s impossible perspective, the way he can peer in at his own story and comment on the shortcomings of the book that made him. We don’t actually have to know how the book was made to find this funny—we don’t have to picture the printer laboriously setting out the rows of metal type and then feeding each page through the press—because no matter
how
it was made, it seems unlikely that this kind of plot flaw could be due to a printer’s error. Cervantes is both accepting the blame and winkingly trying to spread it around, so he allows Sancho to seize on any possible alternative to the idea “that the one who wrote the story must have made a mistake.” The ploy should feel cheap and obvious, and instead it is vertigo-inducing, as if the lid had been blown off the creative process, and all of its participants—author, character, reader—had shrunk to the same size, or grown to the same size, or at any rate become equals. And the joke works equally well in all the different manifestations of the book. It works whether I am reading
Don Quixote
in my beautiful hardcover edition from 1949, still set in hot type, though on an automated press rather than a hand-driven one; or in my cheaper paperback from 1986, by which time the type would have been set electronically; or in a Project Gutenberg digitalized version, where the very name of the beneficent “publisher” alludes to that technological bombshell of 1450, the invention of movable type, which made printers’ errors possible on such a wide scale. I suspect it is a joke that will never die, no matter what happens to the physical form of books.

For an author to forge an intimate connection with you, the book you hold in your hands (or, if hands someday become irrelevant to the process, in your eyes, in your ears, in your mind) need not resemble the actual object he originally put out into the world. And this is true even when he is alluding to that object. Chaucer sends
Troilus and Criseyde
out to us by saying, “Go, litel book, go, litel myn tragedye,” but the book in which I read those lines is not little at all: it is a big, fat edition containing all of Geoffrey Chaucer’s known works, complete with scholarly apparatus. This is not a problem. It is Chaucer’s own voice I hear in this verse, not the editor’s or the printer’s. Part of the reason we value Chaucer so much, part of the reason we still care about him more than six hundred years after he wrote, lies in the strength and particularity of that voice.

He himself was worried, though, about the process of transmission. He says as much in the stanza that immediately follows the “litel bok” passage:

And for ther is so gret diversite

In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,

So prey I God that non myswrite the,

Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.

And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,

That thow be understonde, God I biseche!

There is much less diversity in English now, or at least in its spelling: we would all, these days, “pray … that none miswrite thee,” or express the hope that the book, “read wheresoever thou be, or else sung,… be understood.” But despite its orthographic disguise, the protective concern with which Chaucer addresses his little book is still completely understandable, especially if we consider that “books” then were actually manuscripts, each individually copied by a possibly unreliable scribe. The scribes for
Troilus and Criseyde
may even have been worse than average: at any rate, more variants exist for that text than for many of Chaucer’s others. According to the editor of my scholarly edition, even the most reliable manuscripts of
Troilus
“contain errors and omissions,” and in regard to other revisions or changes, there is “uncertainty whether they are due to Chaucer or a scribe.” So the poet was right to be worried. And yet we have received his transmission in its essence, just as generations of us were able to receive Dostoyevsky’s
Demons
even with its crucial chapter hacked out by the censors. It’s amazing how, against all odds, readers and writers still manage to conjoin.

*   *   *

One more tale about a physical book, and then I am done.

Recently I felt the need to reread Conrad’s
Nostromo
in order to verify that I had been correct in describing it as I had, as primarily grand rather than intimate. The copy of that novel sitting on my shelves was a tattered Signet paperback, with an unbelievable seventy-five-cent price printed on its crumpled front cover. Oh, well, I thought, age cannot wither nor custom stale—but I was wrong. Some books are just too old, or too cheaply made, to be worth reading. This one had such narrow margins that the lines of print disappeared into the gutter and I had to crack the spine to read each page. The printing was so shoddy that if I ran a finger across the type—a dry finger, mind you—the black letters slurred together into an illegible smear. I felt sorry for the younger self who had only been able to afford this version of
Nostromo
; I also admired her persistence in getting through it. I tried reading it for one or two chapters, and then I gave up.