Simon Leys
was fond of quoting a passage from Schopenhauer devoted to what
he called “the art of not reading”:
“It consists
in our not taking up that which just happens to occupy the larger public at any
time, such as political or literary pamphlets, novels, poems, and the like,
which make such a stir . . .. On the contrary, we should bear in mind that whoever
writes for fools always finds a large public; and we should devote the all too
little time we have for reading exclusively to the works of the great minds of
all nations and all ages . . . Only these really educate and instruct. We can
never read the bad too little and the good too often.”
A
self-evident truth, you’re saying to yourself. Life is short. We never have enough
time for the important things. Of course we’ll read The City of God and put aside the latest James Patterson. My
experience with reading has been a little different. Think of one’s intake of
books across a lifetime as an inverted triangle. We start out indiscriminately,
innocently, ignorant of literary history and with unformed critical standards.
We are goatish omnivores. When young, only by reading bad books can we learn to
identify good ones. My James Patterson at age twelve was Edgar Rice Burroughs,
dead two years before I was born. And the Doc Savage series, published two
decades before I arrived. I read them quickly, sometimes a book a day, and as
quickly forgot them, bookish fast food. No regrets. I didn’t know any better,
but the experience immunized me against the Patterson virus. I could never again
be happy reading pulp.
Some will
object: “Elitism! Snobbery!” I’ll admit to being a prig when young, reading
some books (Sartre! Camus!) exclusively so I could say I had read them. That
quickly turns tedious. Remember the inverted triangle: it narrows because you read
not fewer books but better books. By the age of sixty-six, I’m mostly reading
books I’ve already read, none of it pulp. In Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds (trans. Julie Rose, La Trobe
University Press, 2017), Philippe Paquet writes:
“[H]e
observed that ‘Waugh’s grace and dexterity with words’ revealed first ‘the
primordial importance of style’ – for
him. But, Leys qualified, Waugh nonetheless refuted the theory according to
which, often, the success of a work does not depend on the ideas expressed in
it. He reminded us that, for Waugh, ‘all literature implies moral standards and
criticisms.’”
A lifetime of
reading might be distilled like this: One learns to navigate between pure style
on one shore and “moral standards and criticisms” on the other. Stick to the middle
channel and avoid grounding on aesthetic shallows and didactic sandbars. The
rest is smooth sailing.
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