'The Freedom and Leisure to Read at All'

“What do you read when the world around you is passing away?” 

A plaintive question posed by Douglas Dalrymple at Loose Canon, one I’ve never paused to ask. In a sense, the world is always passing away – our world, that little sovereignty of memory and knowledge, along with the bigger one. Doug is writing about Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, published in 1959 and based on the author’s experiences a decade earlier in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. In the meantime, the Arabs had discovered oil and Thesiger’s Bedouins were disappearing.

 

I sense a renewed urgency in Doug’s question. One world in danger of passing away (that queasy euphemism for death) is books. This was unthinkable, even during the Hitler/Stalin era. It was the canaille who didn’t read, who couldn’t fashionably cite Kierkegaard and Proust. Today it’s the tenured who preach an enforced passing away of literature – a perverse inversion of snobbery. The distant, learned, charming, cranky, complicated, witty, commonsensical, all too human – all in danger of being erased with ignorant stridency. How many who call for the cancellation of Shakespeare have given him an adult reading? Doug continues:

 

“Assuming I had the freedom and leisure to read at all, I might keep my King James Bible near at hand, creased open at the Book of Job – and then maybe something more whimsical, like Twelfth Night, or pure and simple, like Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne.”

 

Wise, unexpected selections. Doug is Roman Catholic, so his choice of the King James is especially noteworthy: “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.” In Twelfth Night, the fool, as usual, gets some of the best lines: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Gilbert White hungered after learning:

 

“It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.”

 

Some neighbors are “virtual.” Books ameliorate the absence of White’s near-at-hand neighbors. Communing with long-dead companions is one definition of civilization. In the second-to-last paragraph of his essay “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.”