Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (4 page)

Every age has always encompassed great change. In the fifteenth century – when Gutenberg’s invention of moving type enabled words on the page to become printed books, cheaper to produce
and
available to the world at large rather than to the learned or monastic few – my guess is that the reaction to this transformation was much the same as the dire warnings we hear today about the possible disappearance of the book.

It is illogical to think that my experience with reading and books is unique. It is what writers write, the words on the page, that are important. But reading a book is only one way of communicating with a writer and the thoughts he or she has put down in words to entertain, educate or amuse us. The technological marvels that allow us to download books or print a single copy at the press of a button are additions to, not subtractions from, the pleasure of reading. Books don’t disappear; they remain on shelves, solid, earthed objects in a modern world that has now entered the stratosphere of the Internet, broadband, iPads and e-books.

It may be that books in the form of a printed publication will shiver for a decade or two, but they will never disappear. There they are, in libraries and homes and schools all over the world. Reading a book on a Kindle or an iPad is all very well – in fact it is better than all very well, it is splendidly practical – but it is not the same. A machine can never
look
like a book: books are far
more
beautiful. Books are like gardens; a Kindle or an iPad like a supermarket – it makes life easier, but one doesn’t want to loiter in it. You can fiddle with books. Like gardens, they can be wonderful to look at. You can cuddle them and use them like a hot-water bottle; a machine can’t do any of these things.

It is often said that the modern world provides no time to read. But this is not the case. Until the twentieth century the majority of the human race expended every ounce of energy and every moment of the day struggling to get enough to eat. Vast tranches of the world’s population still live like this today, but for most of us born into fortunate lands we have so much more time to play, to lounge about, to entertain ourselves. This is very recent, yet the human race has been telling stories and trying to record them on papyrus, on manuscripts, on stones, since the beginning of time. Whether we read on the printed page or on a machine is beside the point. It is the ideas and stories that count. Books, light-bulb ideas about publishing them, children who use them to make sense of life will always exist. The human race will read for as long as it survives on this Earth. And books and reading stand there like the largest defensive army in
the
history of world, showing us how to do that. Publishers of books, be it in print or on the Internet, are the foot soldiers of this army. On they go, on they must go.

MAYBE WE CAN
start by reminding ourselves what a strange art form writing is.

For there is no artefact as such: unlike painting or sculpture, there is no image to contemplate, there is no object you can walk around and admire. No one is going to say you must not touch. No alarm will go off if you get too close.

You don’t have to travel to enjoy a piece of writing.

And there is no performance, either. Strictly speaking. Unlike concerts or plays, you don’t have to queue for tickets or worry whether you’re near the front.

You can’t take a photo.

Then a book has no fixed duration. Unlike music, you don’t have to respect its timing,
accepting
, along with others, an experience of the same length.

You can’t dance to it. You can’t sing along.

Instead, there are signs on paper. Or on a screen.

We can change the size, or shape, or colour of the signs, we can alter their distribution on paper, on the screen. We can divide them in pages or, if we want, on the computer we can unite them in one unending page, or one unending line.

Because the signs are not the art itself.

We can read in Baskerville or Bookman, in Arial or Calibri. Bold or italic. Capitals or not. Doesn’t matter.

We can read these signs at whatever speed suits us, stopping and starting again wherever we want, for however long we want; we can leave our book for a tea break, a shopping trip, or a week’s skiing, and still come back without having changed anything.

Only the
sequence
of signs matters. The
writing
is in the
sequence
of the signs. This is the one thing we can’t change. The experience is the sequence. The experience is not in any one moment of perception, but in the movement through the sequence from beginning to end, at our own speed, with interruptions. At the beginning of each
sentence
we are projected towards the end. At the end we have the momentum of the beginning. Same with the paragraph, same with the chapter, same with the whole book, maybe the trilogy. The beginning requires the end, the end the beginning. We are locked into a journey.

Let’s admit the dangers.

When we arrived in this world, before we rightly knew what was going on, they were already filling our heads with words. We came to something we call
consciousness
hearing words. We started to copy words. We realised that making certain sounds in certain sequences would get us what we wanted. Certain formulas expressed pleasure, others displeasure. Soon the words seemed as natural as our cries and shouts and breathing and eating.

They weren’t.

We could barely walk before they put books in our hands. Now they wanted us to imagine the sounds
silently
, constructing them from visual signs, subtracting them from the give and take of company. Alone. Adults read alone, withdrawn, the mind full of words that have no material existence.

Soon the sounds became
pure mental phenomena
. Unheard. Unspoken. If we wish, we can memorise
whole
sequences of signs, from a book, we can learn them off by heart. If you choose, you can have a poem entirely in your head, without ever having heard it aloud. In your head, the remembered poem is
exactly
the poem on the page, not like remembered music or remembered painting, or sculpture, or film, which is necessarily different from the thing itself.

You can say that remembered poem to yourself as often as you choose. You can recite, silently in your head, ‘To be or not to be’. ‘Kubla Khan’.
The Waste Land
. Or something you’ve made up yourself that’s never been written down. No copyright law can defend poetry from memory’s reproduction.

By the time we reach adolescence it is already hard to imagine active, purposeful consciousness without words. It seems a human being can’t really have a full existence without this invention, this great facilitator: the word.

Reading and writing, we find we are moving in a separate system. Not the material world of the senses. The habit is compulsive. The mind’s constant reception and generation of words crowds out its perception of physical phenomena. Absorbed in words, we loosen our grip on things as they are. Or rather, we introduce a new thing
into
that universe: the words exist, after all, in our minds.

This mental, word-driven life is congenial. Reading silently, the words speed up. We follow the sequence faster than we could ever speak it. The eye streaks ahead. The page turns while our sense of what came before is still falling into place. Other perceptions – a distant lawnmower, a smell of fresh baking, a fall of temperature – are dulled. The world has been left behind. Instead a whirling word machine has lifted off from the heavy surfaces of soil, cement and skin. Mind and body part company.

This is the big danger: that our reading will become part of the mental feverishness, the obsessive purposefulness that drains our lives of physical immediacy, threatens our health, risks turning us into frantic compulsives.

It starts at school. Huge amounts of information need to be accumulated, through reading. We must absorb people’s histories, their ideas, their metaphysics, through reading. We must cram. We must buy a pile of books and read them, when the teacher wants, when the curriculum stipulates. We must read
Hamlet
before we’re ready for
Hamlet
. And Chaucer and Donne. We are given the impression that quantity is
paramount
. Better to have read the complete works of Shakespeare than just a couple of plays you liked. Better to have read Brontë and Austen and Thackeray and Dickens rather than just Brontë, or just Dickens. But when? These books are so long. Life is short. And there is Facebook. There is Twitter.

We start to skip. Teacher has led us to believe that we are reading
Middlemarch
for information. For an exam. The same way we are reading
Principles of New Mathematics
for an exam. Or
European History 1815–1914
. Skipping is fine so long as we come away with the appropriate titbits; so long as we find a few significant phrases we can knowledgeably quote. Our multiple-choice exam asks: ‘Was
Lyrical Ballads
first published in: a) 1788, b) 1798, c) 1808, d) 1818?’ Damn! Who reads the copyright page? ‘Was Flimnap a character in: a)
The Dunciad
, b)
Gulliver’s Travels
, c)
Peter Grimes
, d)
The Castle of Otranto
?

Hmmm.

Our reading becomes frenetic, fragmented. We confuse geography books with travel literature, novels with history, and newspapers. All that matters is our ability to gut the material and regurgitate it. After a couple of years of this we discover that when it comes to literature you can
save
even more time reading CliffsNotes. Why didn’t we think of that before?

When we read for pleasure, if we still do, it’s hard to shake the school reading habit, this dreadful acquisitiveness, this grim business of conquest and processing. Now we read for plot. We need to know what happens. And we’re more impatient than ever. TV soaps are so fast. We’ve downloaded the whole of
Friends
, the whole of
Scrubs
. Soaps can tell a great story and get a lot of laughs in just twenty minutes. Why does it take these boring old writers so long? Trying to read Philip Pullman we receive an average of three text messages a page. We stop to reply. It’s going to take for ever to finish this. But we have to read Pullman because everyone does. We need to boast that we have read Pullman. We read the books our peer group reads. Tolkien of course. Skip the songs, though. Skip the guff about Middle Earth. Skip to see if Gandalf is really dead. He can’t have killed Gandalf!

And
Harry Potter
. Everyone reads
Harry Potter
. Can’t remember the name of the author. Who cares? It’s Harry that counts. What will happen to Harry when he grows up? Harry is our generation. Harry is us. What will happen to me? That’s what I need to know. Oh, but this
Deathly Hallows
is
deathly
dull compared to
Scrubs
! Actually, I’ve no idea who wrote that either, though for some unfathomable reason that’s more acceptable.

And after the
Potter
cycle, what do I read next, if I can be bothered to read anything at all? What are my friends reading?
Twilight
. What is in fashion? Vampires. What book will tell me what I have to know? The next part of the story, my story, our story.

Stop!

Breathe, relax.

Let’s have a rethink about the experience books can offer. Let’s try to figure out why we’re not really enjoying ourselves.

A premise.

If everything we see in the world around us has its word, its name, we can also invent words for things we can’t see. Make up a sound and imagine something it refers to: angel, soul, spirit, ghost, god. They exist, in words. In our heads. In our heads, with words, we can conjure anything.

One of the words we invented was ‘self’.

With the words we know, silently, in our heads, we create something, an entity, a fantasy, and we call it ‘self’, a creature with a past and a future, in much the same way that sentences and stories have a beginning and an end. To reassure
ourselves
that it is really there we invented another word: identity. And another: character. And another: personality. The more words, the more our invention exists.

Self is a linguistic creation. It’s hard to have a self without words.

Every self has a story. It exists in relation to other selves and other stories. In a continuum. It seeks to distinguish itself by comparing itself with others, using terms of comparison that again are all words – fear courage, good bad, happy sad, winner loser.

The self exists in a web of words spun out of the mind, separate from the world of sense.

So, these writers telling their stories, scribbling their novels, are exploiting this state of affairs. Using thousands upon thousands of soundless signs, they mimic the way we are forever constructing our lives and the lives of others, in words. They reinforce a process we are all involved in. This is why we get interested. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we refer every story that we read to ourselves, our lives, because the medium of written narrative is intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. Some stories will be liberating: Ah, such and such a thing is possible after all, despite what our friends and parents say.
Some
stories will remind us of dangers: Do this and you’ll end badly, mate. But wait a minute; maybe that thing I want to do is only possible in the world the writer is talking about. Not in my world. Maybe that ending badly had to do with other times, other places, not my time, not my place. Nobody’s stoned for adultery in London. We have to get a sense of where a story is coming from. Context is everything. We have to remember that some of the most brilliant writers were not necessarily wise, not trustworthy.

If we read fast, superficially, for plot, to get through, so as to congratulate ourselves we’ve read a big book that everybody else is reading, or just to get a shot of intense feeling, we’re not only missing out on certain pleasures, we’re actually putting ourselves at risk, leaving ourselves open to messages and attitudes we haven’t weighed up, allowing ourselves to be troubled or enthused, or even terrified, without really knowing if there’s any cause to be.

What pleasures?

I’m going to say that it’s learning how to take intense pleasure in reading that makes it also useful for us, really useful and really exciting. And safe, or fairly safe. So I’d better describe this pleasure well.

Enchantment is part of it. But only part. ‘Enchantment’, from the Latin,
incantare
, an entering into song, into chant. The opening sentences of a novel are an invitation to enter a separate world of rhythm and sound, mental activity and social positioning. They have a voice, a feeling, a direction:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it as if he were free in a mew in West Brompton.

However fast you like to read a book overall, make very sure you read the opening page or two with the utmost care, savouring every word, thinking about where this writer is coming from
and
what kind of spell she or he is trying to draw you into, how anxious he is to impress, whether he’s treating you as dumb or smart, whether he’s serious, whether he’s fun. The first few pages of any Thomas Hardy novel will warn you that the reading experience you can expect is one of waiting for disaster to strike; if you’re not up for it, there’s still time to bail out. The first few sentences of any D. H. Lawrence story tell you that you’d better be ready for an argument – with the author, that is; he’s going to try to ram some very heavy ideas down your throat, but he wants you to fight back. He’s not interested in yes-men.

The pleasure here is of entering into enchantment
slowly
, consciously, with vigilance. Don’t be a pushover. If you feel the writer’s careless – he’s trying to run before he can walk, he imagines you’re a sucker for a bit of blood spilt in the first sentence, or in need of easy sentiment, or titillation – you have every right to resist. You have every right to put a book down after a couple of pages, which is why it’s always wise to read a little before buying. Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.

Basically, what I’m saying is that there are two
sources
of pleasure that you suppose to be in competition with each other, cancelling each other out, but actually they’re not. If you learn to blend them, they actually intensify each other.