'It Can Be Exalting'

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?” 

The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive and ’fess up to the years wasted, money lost, opportunities missed, relationships scuttled, life in general squandered. That would earn me sympathetic murmurs and pats on the shoulder from my fellow addicts, gathered here in a church basement. (“I can quit anytime I want.”) But that’s not the case. I have no regrets for devoting a hefty proportion of my life between the pages of books, especially when I think of popular alternatives.

 

The question was posed by a friend, a retired attorney who is my age and as well-read as anyone currently in my life. “Apart from my family,” he writes, “especially my grandkids, my life in retirement is taken up mostly by reading.” What else is a septuagenarian to do besides, in my case, writing? The driver of my reading is only secondarily a hunger for ideas. Rather, it’s a hunger for words. My friend writes:

 

“This didn't come about unpremeditatedly. I've long planned to devote my retirement to catching up on the reading I was unable to accomplish during my working years. My family aside, nothing gives me more pleasure these days than book reading. It entertains, it informs, it illuminates; with the best books, it can be exalting.”

 

He’s currently exalting with George Eliot, reading for the first time the greatest of all English novels, Middlemarch. For me, the pleasure of discovering and reading good books for the first time has been somewhat displaced by rereading them. Most of the books I read today, especially fiction, are second or third runs. One of the ancillary pleasures of this practice is re-encountering my younger selves, gauging how different the book has grown with age.

 

“It takes me out of myself and the messed-up world,” my friend writes. “And unlike family life, it's stress-free. (I avoid like Cyclospora-carrying lettuce anxiety-provoking books about politics and current affairs.) Yet despite all this, the idea sometimes comes to me that my retirement, like my stock portfolio, needs diversification, that I spend too much of it between the covers of a book. So far, I've resisted the idea successfully.”