A conversation with my husband the other morning (perhaps, if I am honest, it was more me talking and him grunting sleepily at intervals) has inspired me to float this question to a wider audience. It's a genuine question, not an implied criticism; everyone's different and people are entitled to their preferences, private obsessions and priorities. Here's the question: how can you not read? How do you live your necessarily limited life without the enrichment of the experience of others, in other eras and places, with different outlooks, expectations, limitations? Or is there another way I haven't discovered?
No one has the choice of when, where, or to whom they are born; within preset parameters we have some choices, but they are finite. Books, and for me predominantly fiction, are the way I taste the lives of people I have never met, or can never meet if they are imaginary, mediated through the mind of someone else - the author - whom I am equally unlikely to get to know. Recently I have submerged my imagination into the world of the short-lived republic of Biafra, and the effects of the Nigerian war on a number of fictional individuals, and I feel my mental life has been illuminated and made richer by it ('Half of a Yellow Sun' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.) That's just one quite small example.
My life is rich in incident, many-layered, full of people, places, events, thoughts; no doubt yours is too. In this respect it is like the lives of other people, but beyond that their lives and experiences differ wildly. Without books, without the organised setting down of their stories, there is so much I would never know. One life is too short, too narrow, too small! Isn't it? If it isn't for you, how do you endure the circularity of your own thoughts? How do you bear the prison of your own mental processes? Don't you feel a need to escape from yourself from time to time? And if you do, is there another way? I would very much like to know.
I get exactly what you are saying. Unfortunately I most people find this 'fix' through television, movies, or gaming. (At one time i would have just said TV/movies, but I know tons of people - mostly under thirty - who LIVE for their gaming)
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you are right. But somehow it doesn't fill the same need. TV and films do to a degree, except that they interpose the creator's vision in a far more dominating way than books do. I can see that gaming may be an escape from self while it lasts but does it stay with you as part of your psyche? Does it alter you? Having not participated I honestly don't know, but I am puzzled and intrigued to see how this apparently universal need seeks fulfilment in every age. And, I guess, gaming does answer the current move towards interactivity. But reading has always been interactive too - at least between author/reader/characters. I suppose in a sense gaming also creates a kind of virtual community. Reading is a more solitary thing, until you meet someone who has read and understood as you have yourself: always a great (and rare) moment! Thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteI am biased - books have played a central role in my life since I have been able to read, but I might beg to differ in terms of nomenclature, and ask that instead of the word 'book' we can use 'story'. I ask this on the grounds that I took years to learn to read, but had been fed stories through indulgent adults who took the time to read to me. To a lesser degree, stories through film added to the enrichment of my imagination and world - but stories read from books were my first love, and the most influential. The second point is that Child 2 doesn't read; she can read, she adores books, but the process of reading is so laborious that there is no pleasure in it for her. She chooses to listen to audio books instead. There are limitations, of course, but the alternative is not reading at all. So, my simple caveat on a premise which I otherwise endorse is that, when we talk about 'books,' we include stories in all their variety. As for me, could I live without books? Nah!
ReplyDeleteI cannot sit and wait in any waiting room without reading and cannot understand the many who seem content to stare into space quietly waiting their turn without picking up anything to read, To an extent I will read anything rather than nothing - with a thirst for any knowledge - perhaps I miss something though - perhaps they are all meditating and less stressed than I am! Who knows?!
ReplyDeleteI am the same, Eleanor - I will read anything rather than nothing, even when I am waiting at the dentist's and can barely see because I haven't been bothered to take my glasses! In fact I think I am a compulsive reader; if words are in front of my eyes I can't not read them, even if it is something banal like the cereal packet.
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