`We Must Always Be Ready to Try Something Fresh'

Blindness is an inevitable, self-imposed hazard for dedicated readers. It starts with accepting limitations: We can’t read everything, nor can we enjoy, appreciate and understand all that we do find the time to read. Some books and writers, some centuries and national literatures, we jettison out of self-preservation. Others we engage and then abandon as unworthy. If we are fortunate and honest, we incrementally assemble a private library of reliably useful and essential volumes, books that give us pleasure regardless of how often we read them.

I say “hazard” because each time we elect blindness, we risk losing a book that might deserve a space on that sustaining shelf. Most of the books in my collection are long-time acquaintances, some of which I read first as a teenager and to which I have always remained faithful. But others took their place only after I reevaluated faulty or premature assessments. Evelyn Waugh is a good example. So are Robert Musil and Anthony Hecht. Other volumes linger only as memories. Happily gone are Malcolm Lowry, John Barth and Claude Simon.

On Thursday, on the third floor of the university library, I was looking for something in P.G. Wodehouse, a verb he used to render Jeeves’ manner of entering a room. I had been thinking about the comic use of verbs, as in Ring Lardner’s “`Shut up,’ he explained,” but couldn’t remember in which of the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories the verb I half-remembered had appeared. I sat on the floor in front of almost two shelves of gratifyingly well-worn Wodehouse titles, hoping to skim my way to an answer. Instead, I noticed on the shelf below the start of the far more extensive but equally well-worn Virginia Woolf collection. I have read most of her fiction, though not in many years. I feel no compunction about ignoring her endless diaries and volumes of letters, and the vast Bloomsbury industry remains effortlessly simple to avoid. You might assume I’m blind to Woolf’s charms but I have enjoyed some of her essays, especially those in the Common Reader collections.

I found several sets of her collected essays, as well as a lone volume from 1977, Books and Portraits, published by The Hogarth Press, which she and her husband had founded 60 years earlier. I skimmed the contents page and was surprised to see an entry for “Thoreau,” a review that appeared in The Times Literary Supplement on July 12, 1917. I never knew it existed. I had read Woolf on Emerson but never Thoreau, and she surprised me by admiring him as man and writer, without a hint of snobbery and with some suggestion of self-awareness:

“Few people, it is safe to say, take such an interest in themselves as Thoreau took in himself; for if we are gifted with an intense egoism we do our best to suffocate it in order to live on decent terms with our neighbors. We are not sufficiently sure of ourselves to break completely with the established order. This was Thoreau’s adventure; his books are the record of that experiment and its results. He did everything he could to intensify his own understanding of himself, to foster whatever was peculiar, to isolate himself from contact with any force that might interfere with his immensely valuable gift of personality. It was his sacred duty, not to himself alone but to the world; and a man is scarcely an egoist who is an egoist on so grand a scale.”

This says much about Thoreau and more about Woolf. “Gifted with an intense egoism” is priceless, and I was pleased by my unexpected discovery. I continued reading:

“We can never lull our attention asleep in reading Thoreau by the certainty that we have now grasped his theme and can trust our guide to be consistent. We must always be ready to try something fresh; we must always be prepared for the shock of facing one of those thoughts in the original which we have known all our lives in reproductions.”

By this point, of course, she was talking to me: “we must always be ready to try something fresh.” Thank you for the reminder, Virginia. And while reminding us of Thoreau’s fabled night in jail and his zeal for John Brown, she also notes:

“He seems to hug his own happiness.”