'Pleasure in Almost Perpetual Reading'

You’ll find books in every room except the laundry room (nowhere to sit, inadequate lighting, too noisy). The point is urgent availability. Like caffeine and my cane, and unlike television and my smartphone, I need books. I read while frying tofu or brushing my teeth. 

Joseph Epstein coined a phrase to describe this sort of book/host symbiosis: “literary tippling.” A tippler, he notes, is “someone who boozes in small quantities but regularly, stopping just short of actual drunkenness.” Another name for that syndrome is maintenance drinking. A minimal BAC must be maintained or things start getting unpleasant. With books, there’s little likelihood of delirium tremens. The more likely symptoms are fidgeting, irritability and spontaneous bursts of angry song (a poor substitute for the printed word). Epstein writes in his 1998 essay in the Washington Examiner, later collected in Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays (Axios, 2016):

 

“[M]y pleasure in almost perpetual reading has to do with the love of the sentence as a tranquilizer. Something there is about an elegantly turned sentence or a well-made paragraph that calms me and makes me feel that order is possible and life is, against all strong evidence to the contrary, perhaps just manageable. So pleasing is this sensation that I feel, like the tippler from another realm, that I really must have another one -- and as soon as possible.”

 

Bibliomancy is divination by books, especially the Bible and other sacred volumes. My secular variant is to pick up one of the books stacked around the house, open it at random and read the selected page. I’m not necessarily looking for guidance or inspiration. Rather, I toy with the notion that this is a passage I ought to read now. Call it contemplation fodder. Tuesday’s text was George Santayana’s Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Scribner’s, 1936). I opened it to pages 188-189, the conclusion of an essay titled “The Unknowable”:

 

“The existence of this world—unless we lapse for a moment into an untenable scepticism—is certain, or at least it is unquestioningly to be assumed. Experience may explore it adventurously, and science may describe it with precision; but after you have wandered up and down in it for many years, and have gathered all you could of its ways by report, this same world, because it exists substantially and is not invented, remains a foreign thing and a marvel to the spirit: unknowable as a drop of water is unknowable, or unknowable like a person loved.”

 

That certainly qualifies as “an elegantly turned sentence or a well-made paragraph.” The second sentence in particular is a wonder of pacing and organization, including six commas, a semi-colon and a colon. Note the inversion at the end: “a person loved,” not “a loved person” and certainly not “a person whom we love.” Later in the day I read Santayana’s next essay, “Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is,’” which reminds me of Bill Clinton’s famously obfuscatory “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”