"The Test of a Reader'

“. . . to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment—a free grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong.” 

Deciphering signs on a page or screen is not reading. So reductive a definition demeans us and literature. In his essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me” (1887), Robert Louis Stevenson interprets true reading as a challenge, a cleansing effort, a flushing away of dead wood. It is as potent as life itself and fosters a comparable openness to experience. Stevenson continues:

 

“He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays.”

 

Stevenson’s essays are dense with thought – a conclusion I arrived at only in recent years. I read the obvious stuff as a kid – Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde –  and pigeonholed him as a writer of adventure stories for children, easily translated into movies. But even so tough and high-minded a critic as Henry James befriended Stevenson, praised his work, corresponded with him and called him “an indispensable light.” In an 1886 letter, Stevenson tells John Aldington Symonds he has just read Crime and Punishment and calls it “the greatest book I have read in ten years,” and goes on:

 

“Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show.”

 

In seventh or eighth grade I was seated outside the office of a guidance counselor, reading Crime and Punishment for the first time, the passage in which Raskolnikov dreams of the peasant beating his horse. It was like having an illness. I had never read anything like that before. I was appalled and transfixed, and resented the counselor when he interrupted my reading and told me to enter his office. That was sixty years ago and I can effortlessly relive it. That's how important books can be. Stevenson continues in his essay:

 

“It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences.  Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read.  If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author’s folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.”

 

I can no longer read Dostoevsky. I love Henry James. I have no desire to read Stevenson’s fiction. “The test of a reader.”