'We Also Read for Ecstasy'

A reader one-third of my age asks, “Why are books so important to you? What do they matter?” Her questions aren’t cynical. She sounds like a reader driven by the sort of bookish hunger I recognize. Her tastes are eclectic, not confined strictly to the American or the contemporary. She knows her Shakespeare and, better than I, her Robert Browning. 

I’ll get the less flattering answer out of the way: Habit. Pure momentum. Without books I don’t know what I would do with my time not devoted to family, work and their corollaries like grocery shopping and laundry. I love movies but for me they amount to a poor substitute for books. They don’t deliver what I demand of serious reading. I’m willing to settle for less with movies.  A good action flick easily keeps me occupied for ninety minutes. I expect more of books. In his essay “Young Poets, Please Read Everything” (A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2004), the late Adam Zagajewski, a formidably well-read poet, writes:

 

“[O]ur reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened. This is what we call tradition--or history.

 

“We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanist drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry.”

 

Those are handy explanations. I like to learn things, whether quantum mechanics, Henry James’ failure as a writer for the stage or how some people survived the Gulag. But without contradiction I also read for pleasure, what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” I like works that are morally complex, like life. I confess to never asking myself why I read. One glib retort would be, “What’s the alternative?” Reading gives me something to talk about with people like my young reader. Here is Zagajewski’s “Reading Books” from Tremor (trans. Renata Gorczynski, 1985):

 

"Reading books, ah, we kept forgetting

who wrote them and what fights there were

on every page, in every sentence.

The dark moving wood, as on a stage,

grew around the pen, an arrow snatched

in flight, a quill stolen

from half-real birds. It’s only now

they stand still on the bookshelves, so incurious

without recollection, like old men warming themselves

on a street bench in the sun.

Reading books, we kept forgetting

that fear is a wolf who dreads himself

at nightfall and doesn’t know if

there is a mirror someplace, or a spring,

able to put out the yellow flicker

in his slanted eyes. We read books

in order to learn, with relief,

how dangerous Plato’s beast is, the drowsy

tiger that kills only in daylight.”

 

Books are a part of life, not its opposite, some esoteric alternative. Only when we forget who wrote them and treat them as artifacts in a museum, as Zagajewski suggests, do they become inert, strictly academic.