'How to Read Is the Last Thing One Learns'

A dedicated reader’s vision of the good life: “To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.” 

Fat chance, but one tries. I once asked my mother what kind of job I could get that would pay me to read books all day. She laughed, less at my naïveté than at the sheer witlessness of the question. She was nine years old when the Great Depression started. At best, reading was a hobby, like stamp collecting. Her laughter stung but my mother, who was not much of a reader, was correct. It was the fantasy of a boy with a miniscule grasp of reality, though one entertained by a novelist approaching age ninety:

 

“I would read all day long and well into the night if there were no other claims on my time. Appointments with doctors, with the dentist. The monthly bank statement. Income tax returns. And because I don’t want to turn into a monster, people.”

 

That’s William Maxwell in his 1997 essay “Nearing Ninety.” He went on to express his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” Maxwell died in 2000, two weeks before his ninety-second birthday. The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace.

 

The passage at the top was written by the Colombian savant Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994), known to admirers as Don Colacho. He never attended university. He was the rarest sort of autodidact – one who never grew grotesque with self-acquired learning. He never sounds defensive. Such a stance would have been beneath his dignity. The library in his house in Bogotá contained some 30,ooo volumes. His German translator Martin Mosebach visited Gómez Dávila and wrote:

 

“The library was a small hall with bookcases from the floor to the ceiling. Books completely covered a long table, and were even piled up underneath the table, as if they were growing out of the floor.”

 

Don Colacho reminds us that the most obvious things stated matter-of-factly often sound miraculous: “The only indices of civilization are the clarity, lucidity, order, good manners of everyday prose.” Don Colacho trims all fat and ornamentation. His practice is the opposite of most writers’. He never mistakes bulk for worth. A sampler of his thoughts on reading (which are often simultaneously thoughts on writing):

 

“The ‘common reader’ is as rare as common sense.”

 

“Only he who suggests more than what he expresses can be reread.”

 

“Each new truth we learn teaches us to read a different way.”

 

“How to read is the last thing one learns.”

 

“A book does not educate someone who reads it to become educated.”

 

“The pleasant book does not attract the fool unless a pedantic interpretation vouches for it.”

 

“An authentic reader is someone who reads for pleasure the books which everyone else only studies.”