'It Is to Live'

Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us better, more empathetic people, all of which may be true but that’s not why I read. If I were asked for a definitive explanation, I would be lost. In part it’s habit, the pure momentum of a lifetime spent reading, and I see no reason to stop. I know good books make me happy, even their proximity in the same room, which sounds vaguely fetishistic. They’re companionable, friend-like – but so is a cat. There’s consolation in books – but more in loved ones. Such metaphors seem to suggest we read to be in the company of other humans, even when we’re alone. 

Theodore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple premise – the books he has been reading and the thoughts they trigger. They are not collections of reviews and some of the books he reads are admittedly lousy. He’s fond of saying that every book has something of interest in it, something that can be thought about and cherished or dismissed. In the latest installment, Not for the Proud Man Apart (Mirabeau Press, 2026), Dalrymple writes:

 

“[O]ne of the pleasures of growing old – perhaps the pleasure of growing old – is that the association of ideas with what one reads, which is never quite logical, and certainly not voluntary, becomes richer.”

 

I stretch to imagine a life without reading. My understanding of the world would be threadbare. It’s perfectly possible to be virtuous, even saint-like, having never read a book, and it's likely that most of the world’s problems are caused by literate people.

 

For several months early in the century I read nothing but books by or about Henry James. I had returned to college to complete my B.A., having dropped out thirty years before. I was writing a senior thesis on James and his “poor sensitive gentlemen,” life’s spectators, too timid or passive to do other than live an unlived life. I began to notice the peculiar regularity with which benches appear in his novels and stories, often as a refuge for such characters.

 

Madame de Mauves in her eponymous story occupies a bench on the terrace at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye when she is introduced to Longmore. Frederick Winterbourne is seated on a bench outside the hotel at Vevey when he first meets Daisy Miller. Isabel Archer takes her place on a bench at Gardencourt during her final scene with Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady. For their only meeting outside her workplace, the unnamed heroine of “In the Cage” sits with Captain Everard on a park bench in London and announces her secret, unacknowledged devotion. Dencombe, the doomed, doubt-wracked novelist in “The Middle Years,” faints and comes under the care of Dr. Hugh while on a bench at the seaside. Stransom suffers his apparently fatal attack on a chapel bench in front of his altar at the conclusion of “The Altar of the Dead.” John Marcher twice takes his seat on a bench in “The Beast in the Jungle,” James’ greatest story.

 

It’s thesis fodder, I know, of no interest to anyone. But by reading James I became aware of the ways people use park benches – for lovers’ trysts, as a place for tired parents to watch their kids, as a public sanctuary for old people. I consulted Jane Jacobs on the importance of urban parks. I experienced no colossal epiphany. I just made life a little more interesting.

 

Henry Oliver writes about books with love and without grandiosity. In “Literature as Part of Life,” a recent essay at The Common Reader, he writes: “To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are.”