why i read

i sat down to watch sunset limited for the first time and very quickly felt like some sort of benevolent intrusion was occurring. sunset limited, written by cormac mccarthy, is an hour and a half dialogue between two characters that is decidedly mccarthy-esque. every line is dripping with cormac. i’ve read all dozen, and been very affected by some, of his novels. i know who he is, at least who he is to me, intimately. which is not to say i know what most closely reflects him or what he intended to relay to the reader with the work. i know only about the direct line from him to me. there is a voice in my head that represents a relationship with his words. then, sitting in front of the tv, that voice was taken over by the voices of samuel l. jackson and tommy lee jones.

i have an affection bordering on religious for the bards that reach me most deeply. a wise friend once called me a cormac-ite. he meant it. i have said there is life before joan didion and life after joan didion and i meant it in near the way a born again says this about jesus. reading the white album was an experience that went to marrow. that such sharpness and honesty as didion had at hand exists is more than a fact that can be recited. it is felt and ingrained.

it would be understandable if you found it concerning that one feels he’s best “understood” by writers, none of whom he’s met. many of whom hardly lived in the world he does. most of them dead. and perhaps further concerning that a number of those dead writers died by own hand.

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i’m not a uniquely prolific reader. i read more than most people but that’s just because most people watch too much fucking television and do too much fucking scrolling. i reckon the amount i read, which my friends consider a lot, is what an average person did maybe a hundred years ago. when there were less entertainment options readily available.

i don’t own an outstanding collection of books (i’ve never once sought out a first edition) or have a literature degree or for that matter much of an understanding about anything like literary themes or story structures. i pay very little attention to these things and probably usually miss them entirely. i feel i am eternally wandering cluelessly through stories.

likely nothing about me as a reader is all that unique or impressive. but i find myself more and more identifying as one. both as from others and to my self. a part of my being is that i prefer to frequently sit in silence and participate in a seemingly one way conversation for hours a day. why?

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certainly, at times, i read for escapism. it is, for me, an unchallenging task. it is a place to go to avoid my to-do lists. it is truly amazing some days the things i can be convinced one moment i really ought to do that i can so easily push aside in the name of not having read “enough” on those days and certainly i’m aware that this may be evidence of a sinister inner me with his hands on the dials pushing me away from what might challenge me or put me on the track to success in life.

i take numerous pictures of passages that excite me in one way or another but the pictures exist in a number of places. i note some of these passages in various notebooks. but as these have been habits of mine for over a decade and i’ve yet to come up with any system for putting them all in one place, and that i don’t very often find myself seeking them out, it seems more like a practice merely for the sake of doing than any attempted cataloging for future use. reading to me is not an accumulation of information. i can hardly remember anything i read, to the point that on my more pessimistic days i worry victim of a sort of early onset alzheimer’s or a tough roll of the dice for one of the millions of us who got hit in the head a lot in our formative years.

i read because it is an experience of time and time again being revealed the real truths. and those truths being less about the precise words used to lay them bare than the experience of interacting with those words. it’s about being hit deeply with a genuine strike of “you have felt this” — and in this way reading is a sort of being seen. i.e., i know i exist because i can relate or can be so affected by the creation of another that for all sense of relation to me might as well have been created in a vacuum.

and maybe i’m wrong there. maybe coming across those words is proof that there are no vacuums. that we’re all in the same space. that we can be reached. that no man is an island.

nor is he, though he might constantly wish to be, capable of defying transience. your moment to moment experience is not the accumulation of all the moments of experience that lead to it. it also isn’t ever the future. it’s just a continuous succession of nows. even if that thing you dread the arrival of ever comes to fruition it won’t be the thing you dreaded because it’ll be a different you and another now.

and so i read because while i read the act of doing so has a chance to take me in entirely. in a world of constant context shifting and scene changes, it is a chance to get lost in a very simple, direct task. to be fully there.

the reading is about sitting with those words that someone thought were important enough to record and just being with them, then. this is reading as an understanding that the act itself is just another fragile, temporary now and that we are oh so very lucky to get to experience the direct line that travels space and time between the person who put the words down and the person who’s picking them up.

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“In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us… ‘the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.’ …to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is ‘to paint eyeballs on chaos.’ When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present — even while I think of it — is gone.” — Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard