'The Sign of Memory and the Sign of Ecstasy'

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): 

“[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.”

 

Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing himself to loving the great poet long before embracing the author of Les Fleur du Mal. I understand the process but in my case it was less linear and immediate, more halting and delayed. I shed various bookish enthusiasms along the way before settling on the “receptivity” to the writers who possesses me today.

 

With the passing of adolescence I adopted some of the American realists, of varying talents and readability – Dreiser, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson, even Steinbeck. That didn’t last long. Next came Modernism – Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Proust – some of whom I still admire and read. After that, the evolution of taste became more diffuse. Post-modernists and various non-aligned figures made their appearances, but my loves and distastes became, after many decades, more settled and defensible – and eclectic, the product of a life spent reading widely.

 

I’m not a literary determinist but I know my mind by this time in my life. My current inner library is not made of bronze and ejections are still possible, as are new books and writers, but I’m pleased by what is important to me.

 

So, why do I read what I read? I have no ironclad theories. The unflattering answer is habit. Pure momentum. Without the books I love 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.”