Well,
yes – and no. For some of us, sometimes. At age twelve, plowing through the
overheated oeuvre of Edgar Rice
Burroughs, I was avoiding a lot of things, including growing up, and were I
reading Burroughs with comparable avidity today, almost half a century later, I
would probably have succeeded in avoiding most of adult life. The demands of
maturity, biological and otherwise, have seen to it that I put aside childish
things. When a nominal adult gushes over sci-fi, I squirm a little.
Like
Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore
Dalrymple) in “The digital challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book,” I’m addicted to printed matter and recognize the symptoms of withdrawal:
“…we grow agitated and begin to pine, by which time anything will do: a bus
timetable, a telephone directory, an operating manual for a washing machine.”
Like the drunk who resorts to chugging Aqua Velva, I found myself recently reading
the list of ingredients on a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Is this a strategy
for avoiding unpleasantness? Daniels writes:
“We
gorge on the printed page to distract ourselves from ourselves: the great
business of Doctor Johnson’s life, according to Boswell and Johnson himself.”
Johnson
rightly advises Boswell that “it is better if a man reads from immediate
inclination,” which would seem to include diversionary and time-killing
reading. But I would argue that serious reading, which sometimes begins in a spirit of
escapism, represents not a proxy but a true engagement with life. Whether Tolstoy, Babel or
Beckett, the lasting writers are truth tellers and offer messiness and
intractability galore, including the messiness and intractability of truth. As
Johnson reminds us, “the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to
enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Normally, I would never read something
titled “The Digital Challenge” or “The Fate of the Book.” Too portentous and
self-important sounding, like anything with “manifesto” or “theory” in its
title. But Daniels, characteristically, writes from experience. When he looks
at the books on his “laden shelves,” he says: “They are my refuge from a world that
I have found difficult to negotiate.” He has written an elegy for a gift that
has not quite left us:
“Whether
the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that it ought to survive, and nothing will
convince me otherwise. The heart has its beliefs that evidence knows not of.”
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