`On the Shore of an Immensity'

“Although a great reader, he disliked flaunting a too-visible wardrobe of learning; yet how could his intensive, extensive reading not enter the writing? Reading is passed down to others the way parents pass down their traits. One may even wonder if there have ever been great readers who did not go on to write in one form or another. He was an omnivorous reader.”

This is Anne Atik writing of her friend Samuel Beckett in How It Was. The coexistence of the will to read and to write would seem self-evident, though I’ve known at least one novelist who had read little and proclaimed, rather insistently, indifference to literary tradition. That he was not a very good novelist is probably coincidental. Of the few “great readers” I have known, all were nominal writers, whether poets or professors.

Somewhere, Emerson writes of wishing to be a doctor in the company of doctors and a soldier with military men. As a boy and young man, any book I enjoyed I longed to have written. I willed myself into imagining I had written it, savoring the accomplishment of creating a book but also looking at it from the author’s vantage. The act of claiming it as “mine” oddly made the book seem new and strange again, and often enabled me to quickly reread it – with new eyes, as it were. I no longer do this, though annotations, reviews, notebooks, commonplace books and blog posts may represent the same impulse transformed. Perhaps writing has roots in envy. Leon Wieseltier writes in Kaddish:

“It is in the hall of study we pray. The beauty of the room is owed to its homeliness. It is decorated only with books. When I stand by the wall of books, I feel as if I am standing on the shore of an immensity.”