'He Read With Such Touching Absorption'

A friend referred me to “Mendel the Bibliophile,” a 1929 story by Stefan Zweig about an other-worldly reader who sits in the back room of a Vienna coffee house, the Café Gluck, during World War I. Jakob Mendel is a walking library catalogue who effortlessly commits bibliographical information to memory and is consulted by scholars. The narrator is researching Franz Mesmer and his theory of animal magnetism, and consults Mendel rather than librarians. Here he describes Mendel reading a book: 

“[H]e read as other people pray, as gamblers gamble, as drunks stare into space, their senses numbed; he read with such touching absorption that the reading of all other persons had always seemed to me profane by comparison. As a young man, I had seen the great mystery of total concentration for the first time in this little Galician book dealer . . . a kind of concentration  in which the artist resembles the scholar, the truly wise resembles the totally deranged. It is a tragic happiness and unhappiness of total obsession.”

 

Some of you will read that passage autobiographically. I remember when I brought my middle son – then about ten, now a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps -- to a barber shop with me. While I was getting my hair cut, he sat in an unoccupied barber’s chair reading one of the Harry Potter books. He was so absorbed in the story that he ended up sitting backwards in the chair, legs under the arms, and slowly slid until his back was on the foot rest. Michael reminded me of Guy Davenport’s great essay “On Reading”:

 

“For the real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility, quite literally to give oneself over to Henry James or Conrad or Ausonius, to Yuri Olyesha, Bashō, and Plutarch.”   

 

Not that J.K. Rowling is Henry James. Rather, a book assimilates the right reader into its world. It is a machine to induce self-forgetting. Our quotidian existence is left behind, wiped away like chalk on the blackboard.

 

[You can find “Mendel the Bibliophile” in The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (trans. Anthea Bell, Pushkin Press, 2013). “On Reading” is collected in Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus (1996).]