'You Are Never Out of Business'

“I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereading those I failed to read carefully enough the first time round.”

I hear in Joseph Epstein’s bookish declaration an echo of Logan Pearsall Smith’s well-known admission: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Non-readers, a growing constituency, are likely baffled by such thoughts. Books for them are associated with tedium, snobbery and coerced classroom assignments. Who can blame them for not wanting to read To Kill a Mockingbird?  I have no grand theories about reading and not reading. I don’t know how to explain such divergent sensibilities – though lousy teachers have something to do with it -- nor do I wish to harangue others into reading Tristram Shandy. I came from a family of non-readers. Nothing human ought to surprise us.

 

Epstein will turn eighty-nine on Friday, January 9. His recent essay in The Free Press is titled “I Want to Die with a Book in my Hands.” I’m seventy-three and share the sentiment. Epstein has often noted his fondness for aphoristic writing, prose that is pithy, dense with thought, often equipped with a barb. Here he is on reading at an advanced age after a lifetime of reading:

 

“My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.”

 

I can endorse all of that. Like Epstein, I have read Proust’s masterpiece twice and am contemplating a third reading. Why take on its 1.2 million words yet again? I read Remembrance of Things Past the first time at age eighteen, one summer while managing a miniature golf course. The afternoons were quiet and I could read, nearly uninterrupted, in the clubhouse. When a revised edition in three volumes was published a decade later, I read it again. No one remembers every authorial move even in a short story. What I retain from Proust’s 3,200 pages is a general outline, a sort of novelistic road map of the narrative’s plan, plus isolated incidents and a recollection of occasional intense pleasure. I seem to have lost little or nothing of my attention span – a plague in portions of the population. Also, like Epstein, I’m inclined to reread books “I failed to read carefully enough the first time round,” as he puts it. It’s a cliché to say I’m not the man I was at eighteen or thirty. In a very real sense, I’ll be reading the novel for the first time.

Vladimir Nabokov speaks for me and perhaps for Epstein: “To be a real reader, you have to reread a book. The first time, the book is new. It may be strange. Actually, it is only the second reading that matters.” And the third.

 

Like Epstein, vast categories of books remain No Man’s Land for this reader – contemporary fiction, most politics, mysteries and thrillers of any vintage, science fiction, self-help, celebrity memoirs, etc. Such reading is one more symptom of our age’s pervasive presentism. The present, after all, is a provincial backwater. As Epstein puts it:

 

“Fortunately, one can live quite well on the literary culture of the past. I find myself rereading, among others, George Eliot and Willa Cather, Shakespeare and Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal. A nice thing about the reading life is you are never out of business.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe.