'That Privacy We Both Obey'

In “Reading,” a poem he collects in The Covenant (1984), Dick Davis describes the act of reading a novel as “that privacy / We both obey.” He watches another reader pat her book’s spine with “thoughtful tenderness,” recognizes the gesture as his own and wonders which of them made it first. So private an act as reading is beyond regulation, which is the reason books make tyrants and other busybodies nervous. Readers and their books defy surveillance. Look at the pictures in On Reading (1971) taken by the great Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Some suggest an intimacy almost sexual and prompt voyeuristic embarrassment in the viewer. Would you want to be photographed while in the self-forgetting raptures of intent reading?

A reader writes to say that reading books and writing about them “in a time like this” is “a selfish waste of time” and “self-indulgent.” Perhaps. I’m not an immunologist. I have no marketable skills “in a time like this.” I’ll never cure COVID-19. I trust that better minds than mine are at work on the problem. I’m doing the effortless things it takes to keep my family healthy. If that means staying at home more often than I might like, washing my hands a little longer than I normally do and rereading Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, I’m happy to do it.

[In National Review, Kevin D. Williamson writes about reading Middlemarch in a time of COVID-19: “One of the little tortures of the current epidemic is that there is so little to do — and by that I do not mean that I am bored (I am not), but that there is so little to be done, that the most useful thing that most of us can do in response to the coronavirus is passive: self-quarantining, and quietly taking care of ourselves so that we will not be an unnecessary burden on others. I have plenty of writing to do and a stack of reading to get through. And I am glad those are my problems — other people have serious ones, beginning with sickness and joblessness, and they need our help. I am confident my stock portfolio will recover. In the meantime, I think of Irving Kristol’s laconic response when a friend told him that civilization was collapsing: ‘It’s still possible to live well.’”]