`Books Think for Me'

I’m blessed with thoughtful, book-loving, independent readers. A Canadian in his mid-thirties writes that after almost a decade in “construction and other blue collar endeavours,” he returned to the university with the intention of deepening his love of literature by studying it systematically:

“Yet in the literature classes I took I found what to me was a disturbing tendency to focus either on identity politics or historical contextualization. The actual study of the literature as artistic or aesthetic creations was often absent. I feared that if I continued my studies in Literature I would lose my passion in a fog of theory and pedantry. Therefore I switched to the study of history and found myself thriving.”

Like the ninth-grade biology teacher who helped extinguish my budding career as a field biologist, the instructors my reader encountered devoted themselves to wringing the joy out their discipline. Illness forced him to leave school prematurely. He’s still recovering, while caring for a family member, but he recently read Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, which reminded him, he said, of John Donne:

“And while I no longer subscribe to a particular religious belief, I still treasure his poetry. I enjoy his secular work, but his Holy Sonnets still reward my mind and my soul. So for the last several weeks, then, I've read Donne's poetry often - either at home or at the park…

“Donne, however, sent me back to Whitman. I find similarity in the ferocity with which they assert themselves. And although tempered by moments of doubt and pause, there is a conviction and certainty to their work (regardless of subject) that for me links them in a way I can appreciate. So I have my complete Whitman off the shelves as well.”

By the way, he’s also reading Herzog, which is “proving to be more enjoyable than I was prepared for.” Here’s a man who appears to read as I do, with pleasure and intensity. He trusts in serendipity and the vagaries of his own tastes, and permits them to plot his course of reading. A note from a reader in Texas arrived the same day as the one from Canada:

“I'll have you know that you are responsible for one more trip to the library later this afternoon to check out their one book by Herbert Morris, someone unknown to me until I read about him in your blog.”

I would blog even if such readers had never existed but it’s reassuring and invigorating to know people are still reading for the same reasons as Charles Lamb. In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” he writes:

“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”