Books, Part I

For Michel Montaigne, reading erased gaps in time. He wrote that it doesn't matter whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or ten. "Both are equally remote; both are equally close." For Montaigne, sitting down to read Plutarch in his tower above the vineyards was nothing short of meeting a person from across the centuries, as if time was just a room, and Montaigne brought Plutarch--that shy wallflower--across the room to his comfy chairs all to chat this evening. Through his writing, Montaigne knew Plutarch so well, he wrote, "I think I know him even into his soul." Montaigne was not like Machiavelli who once described his reading couture: "I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress, I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them." Montaigne was a flipper of pages. He wandered from one chapter to another, one book to another, generally, and along the way wasn't afraid to make fun of the "ancients." He claimed, for example, that Virgil could have tried harder. If a book was boring, he did not "gnaw his nails over them." He left them there. His father had raised him with a philosophy of life that informed his philosophy of reading, and his philosophy of living: "gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint."

I imagine Montaigne--retired at the age of 37 from working at city hall--atop his tower, alone, with dozens of candles. It's summer time so the window is open and owls hoo-hoo atop the shed that hold the barrels of maturing wine; the owls are the only sound as he sits in his reading chair. There is no email or texting or Facebook to update. There is no fridge to go to, no watch to check, no phone to dial, no music to clean to. There is Plutarch in his hands and wine on the table, and that's the moment, well-defined, crisp.

But Montaigne isn't really in that room. Sure, his small body is there, but his mind is not. His mind is in the book. Montaigne is in that meditation, eyes skirting over the words, each word anchoring him down into the ethereal sea of Imagination. He is not in his tower outside of Bordeaux. He is, in fact, sitting at Plutarch's stone table now, in Chaeronea, 20 miles east of Delphi. They sip wine from ceramic cups on the patio, munching on olives. It's a summer evening and Plutarch speaks of metaphors, using mothers-in-law, flies on mirrors, and seeds, all vehicles to examine How to Live. When it's dark, Montaigne closes the book and leaves ancient Greece. He goes to his bedroom and curls up with his wife, Francoise. Before he closes his eyes, he looks at the curtains in the moonlight silently waft in the breeze, like jellyfish in the current. Then he looks at the moon. Then he sleeps.

Plutarch, too, goes to bed, back in his century, a little drunk, his breath familiarly smelling of garlic and feta and wine. He, too, looks at the moon, before falling asleep.

This is what seems to happen when one closes a book at night: everyone in the history of ever goes to sleep.

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Reading is epitomized for me in the moment I close a book and sigh. A closing of the book plus a sigh is my equivalent of saying ole to a matador. It's the reason I studied literature for four years: that moment. My sighing has not been a sign of maturity. (As I've gotten older--which is to say, as technology has seeped in around me more and more--I have become a worse reader.) I've always done it. I can still palpably feel the sheets of my childhood beds, my pelvis against the mattress, my elbows propping me up, the book settled on the pillow. A nightstand light (I can still see its switch) illuminates the dark room, and silently and in this position, I read for hours. A school night, a summertime night, a dark Seattle October afternoon: this was how I read. When I closed that book--Matilda, The Little Prince, Ralph S. Mouse, Hatchet, Let's Go to Tunisia, Fade, The Catcher in the Rye, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, The Sun Also Rises--I sighed. I flipped the switch before I flipped on my back. Then I looked at the galaxy of darkness above me. I projected upon it the faces of protagonists, the ache of their conflicts, the beauty of their settings. I sighed, and warm with the lessons and thoughts of my ancients, I slept.

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All this said, being "warm with the lessons and thoughts of ancients" is rarely a "fun" act. Even when reading the essays of Woody Allen or the antics of Yossarian in Catch-22, reading is rarely fun. Tennis is fun; playing Angry Birds is fun; bullshiting at a bar with friends is fun. But reading is generally not fun.

By nature, it's a lonely. Even when reading with others around--which I'm not convinced can be done very well--you quickly become alone. The voices of kids playing on the beach, a lover's arm over your stomach, clanking of coffee cups in a cafe--all this fades in a concentrated moment of reading. It's gone; you're alone.

Additionally, reading isn't entertaining, at least not in the 21st-century meaning of the word. There are no lights or sounds; you are not passively taking images in; there is no rapid clicking transporting from one picture-worth-a-thousand-words to another in less than a second. Your brain is churning, cog-like through the words, and you can't get to the next page until you do the work on this page. I think reading feels very unmodern. It's not just that reading happens on paper--I'll get to Kindles in a second. It's that it's so slooooowwwwww. My students--so many of whom come from homes with few books--often complain (some sincerely, some for silly effect) how booorrrring reading is. I can't completely disagree. I often find myself playing some silly game on my iPhone before going to bed, instead of reading, and it's a conscious choice of "This game will be more fun than that New Yorker." Of course, I verbally do disagree with them, telling them truths that they can't understand until they experience them. "Reading brings enlightenment. Reading slows you down, and that's good. Reading transports you to other places. Reading lets you think about things at the pace you choose. Reading helps you find yourself, and because we look for ourselves our entire lives, reading can, if you let it, satisfy you from now until the day you die."

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That said, I don't get as much satisfaction from books as I used to. That has nothing to do with the books I'm reading and everything to do with my environment. What I need to read well is the following: very little electronics around me. No iPhone, no television, no stereo. In a recent trip to Mexico with Erica, for one week I read. I read deeply, with concentration. I read articles in Harper's I'd normally skip over; I read Thoreau. Why? Because there was basically nothing else to do! A few months back, I went with friends to Leavenworth, Washington, and I got sick. They all went out into town; I stayed back in the cabin and read for hours. I read Freedom by Franzen. When I lived in my home Chile--where there was no TV, no nothing--I read single books in nights. I scourged shitty bookstores for anything moderately decent, and I read books I would have nver read otherwise. In the evenings, on the couch, I read and read and read, and when tired, I didn't hazily plug through another unmemorable night of SportsCenter or Seinfeld. I went to sleep.

These intense times of reading give those memories depth and weight, and interestingly, not just the intense reading stand out, the all the experiences during these times (dancing, eating, playing games, lovemaking) are also more vivid.

The juxtaposition of intense reading, intense aloneness with socializing make both pop out in Memory, I think.

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It comes down to the lessons of our grandparents, which are the same as the Stoics': delayed gratification, deep work, grinding through pain, slowness: these all are central to living a complete and satisfied human life. These things were in service of Montaigne's trinity of happiness: Thriving, Enjoying the Moment, and Being a Good Person. For Montaigne, the way to enjoy life was to experience, to some degree, grief and boredom and hard work. In order to enjoy anything, he needed contrast.

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For us, the Committed, life is generally good and easy. We have so much to be thankful for; we benefit from so much. Our medicine works, our cars work, our injuries heal, our currency is accepted, our supermarkets are full, our parks clean, our government legit. Life is easy, but still we are anxiety-ridden, still we find errors, still we complain. I think we'd agree that we don't appreciate what we have. Maybe it's human nature, but I think it's Us. Maybe we have it too easy. Maybe we need a recession. Maybe we need global warming. Maybe we need the Viaduct to collapse. Maybe we need that lay-off to happen, that argument to erupt.

Perhaps we know that the only way for us to better enjoy our easy lives is to make them harder, and that requires Accident or Choice, and we've no desire (or courage) to choose pain.

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In sum, I guess it's all the heavy traits of books--lonely, slow, silent, dense--that make them so damn important to living well.