'Revelations in the Act of Reading'

Damian at A Sunday of Liberty wastes no time being tactful: “Most people don’t read.” That hardly comes as a surprise and Damian cites a survey to prove it. I’ll rely, naturally, on anecdotal evidence. In my thirteen years at Rice University, I have almost never met a dedicated reader. We can quibble about definitions. I know several people who take books seriously and periodically read good ones, which makes them anomalies at a contemporary American university. But I’m talking about free-range readers, reading as a way of life, as a means of internalizing what used to be known as the canon – people who read for the conjoined gifts of knowledge and pleasure. They may be hiding around campus but I’ve never heard even a rumor of their existence. Damian puts it like this: 

“Hardly anyone reads lit-rah-chur or weighty nonfiction for pleasure. The liberal arts conceit of a large population of humanities majors and passionate autodidacts gathering in every coffeehouse to discuss great novels and the human condition is just that, a conceit.”

 

I fell for that conceit when young. It was comforting to think I could escape from my non-reading biological family and be welcomed into the surrogacy of a sensitive reading “community.” (One can’t use that debased word without scare quotes.) The book that came to mind after I read Damien’s post was Józef Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (New York Review Books, 2018). Spared the fate of some 22,000 fellow Polish officers, executed at Katyn by the Soviets in the spring of 1940, Czapski and 395 other Poles were sent to a work camp 250 miles northeast of Moscow.

 

As a respite from chronic hunger, the cold and overwork, the men organized a series of evening talks. Officers would select a subject they knew well – history, French painting, soccer – and share their knowledge with the others. They were without books or other research materials, and so relied on memory. Czapski chose to talk – in French -- about Proust and his masterwork. Lost Time includes transcripts of the lectures as recorded by other prisoners. Czapski’s ability to recall details from À la recherche du temps perdu, concisely organize them, and reflect on his own experience of reading Proust is miraculous. The book stands as a tribute to the endurance of the civilizing impulse under impossible conditions, and might be recommended to readers contemplating their first immersion in Proust. In his introduction to Lost Time, the translator Eric Karpeles writes:

 

“Throughout war-torn Europe, civilian and military prisoners in other Soviet and German camps experienced similar revelations in the act of reading. Jorge Semprún, a Spanish writer working with anti-Franco forces in France, was arrested by the Gestapo and shipped to Buchenwald, where, he declared, he was saved by his focus on Goethe and Giraudoux. Yevgenia Ginzburg, a teacher and Communist Party member accused of Trotskyist sympathies, drew strength from Pushkin as she fought to stay alive in the Siberian Gulag. In his book If This Is a Man, Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi described the unexpected emergence of a jumble of lines of terza rima from The Divine Comedy as he was shouldering a vessel filled with a hundred pounds of murky soup out to a work detail in the fields at Auschwitz, a teenaged prisoner from Strasbourg at his side.”

It may be necessary to point out that I'm not endorsing the establishment of Arctic labor camps as a way to get people reading again.