'Books Are Good Enough in Their Own Way'

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” 

But it’s not an either/or choice, is it? The binary approach is useful in theory but falls apart in practice. To use a word I’ve grown to dislike outside of its strict biological sense due to sloppy overuse, the relation of books to life is symbiotic. Even that requires clarification. Symbiosis comes in three forms: commensalism, mutualism and parasitism. In the first, one species benefits, the other remain unaffected. In the next, both benefit. And in the third, one benefits while the other is harmed. For serious readers, the relation of books to life is one of mutualism. The benefits to readers are obvious. How do books benefit? They remain dormant blocks of cellulose until someone reads them.

 

The observation at the top is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “An Apology for Idlers” (Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers, 1881). As a defense of the Rooseveltian “strenuous life,” Stevenson is tepidly convincing. Like Chekhov, he was fatally sick with tuberculosis but managed to live an industrious, productive, well-travelled life. The obvious reply is Logan Pearsall Smith’s well-known wisecrack in Afterthoughts (1931): “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading” – a sentimental favorite among serious readers. Immediately before the sentence at the top, Stevenson writes:

 

“It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: ‘Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.’ The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick.”

 

For context regarding the Johnson passage quoted by Stevenson, the date is July 21, 1763. Boswell had met Johnson for the first time just two months earlier. The friends are dining in the Turk’s Head coffee-house in the Strand. Johnson prefaces his remarks about the old man in Oxford with this:

 

“Sir, I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first place, I don't like to think myself growing old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, Sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect. I love the young dogs of this age, they have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good scholars. Sir, in my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now. My judgement, to be sure, was not so good; but, I had all the facts.”

 

That hasn’t been my experience but I admire how Johnson at age fifty-four speaks enthusiastically of young people. Compared to him I was a slow learner, a late bloomer, though I “read very hard.” Life is the thing but books for some of us are almost the core of life. I remember Marius Kociejowski telling me his favorite writers were Johnson and Stevenson.