I was alone one weekend in my junior year of college. My friends had left town and I was, for once, caught up with my studies or caught up enough to read what I wanted. It was spring in Northwestern Ohio and the trees were smeared with green. I felt a self-conscious sense of ceremony as I went to my carrel on the sixth floor of the library solely to read The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. I knew the book secondhand by way of Laurence Sterne, who had cribbed from it shamelessly in Tristram Shandy. I read through the afternoon and into the warm, humid evening. For perhaps the first time in my life, I read as a form of ritual and without effort, as though the book were somehow reading me. That’s where my memory ends. I’ve read thousands of other books in the subsequent 34 years, reread The Anatomy of Melancholy twice and dipped into it more times than I can remember but in no other reading experience have I felt so passive, privileged and overpowered. Guy Davenport knew what I was talking about the one time I met him. In “On Reading,” an essay first published in Antaeus and collected in The Hunter Gracchus, he describes a similar experience with another word-drunk book:
“A memory: I was desperately poor as an undergraduate at Duke, did not belong to a fraternity, and except for a few like-minded friends….was romantically and self-indulgently lonely. I was already learning the philosophical simpleness that would get me through life, and I remember a Saturday when I was the only person in the library. I took out Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (buff paper, good typography) and went back to my room. I felt, somehow, with everybody else out partying….Faulkner deserved my best. I showered, washed my hair, put on fresh clothes, and with one of Bob Loomis’s wooden-tipped cigars, for the wickedness of it, made myself comfortable and opened the Faulkner to hear Miss Rosa Coldfield telling Quentin Compson about Thomas Sutpen.”
When we are ready for it, a book can turn us into supplicants. Such a book inspires wonder, humility and the most sublime pleasure for a lifetime.
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Oh goodness yes. I recall moments like this from my own life. I am a salesman working in the steel industry and found myself stranded in the milltown of Youngstown Ohio. I had with me a book my wife had been reading entitled, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. I sat in the motel's "restaurant" eating, drinking coffee and obsessively reading. That book ripped my life awake, to quote a song.
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