On audiobooks, I’m agnostic. I’ve sampled a few of them, from time to time, but I have not been able to sustain attention and interest. I understand that proponents of audiobooks often highlight as a virtue the affordance of multi-tasking. You can listen while you do other things, like chores and commutes. But it doesn’t quite work well for me. For similar reasons, I think, I’ve never gone podcast-crazy, though I do listen to them a bit more often. Maybe I’m a bad multi-tasker.
Oral precedes literate, and one can argue that certain works of literature are better read aloud than silently. Moreover, how many family parlors in the past were filled with the sound of reading out loud from a book? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the practice of listening to literature instead of reading it silently. (Remember also that silent reading has a history; in earlier history reading involved the sound of speech.) Yet, while I don’t think anyone should feel any shame about audiobooks, I also don’t think that listening is the same activity as reading. They’re different, and that doesn’t mean one is bad and the other is good.
Ask a group of Americans what they like to read, and the answers, in my experience, will be dominated by bestselling literary fiction and non-fiction books, genre fiction, comic books, and audiobook versions of some of these same things. (This may even go in reverse order of popularity.) It’s the kind of stuff you’ll see highlighted at your local Barnes & Noble, even as the art that adorns the walls of these stores foregrounds a more “elevated” and “literary” bookishness of Hemingway and Morrison, Joyce and Dickinson. A person who reads Robert Ludlum, or maybe Delia Owens, is easy enough to find; someone who reads, say, Garielle Lutz, or Thomas Browne, less so. What rankles me a bit is not that people don’t like the “correct” things but rather that most people do, precisely, like the correct things. It’s encouraged to do so without digging or asking any questions or taking any chances.
There is the desire to be encyclopedic and to retain information with a synoptic view and quick, detailed recall. “Yes, I’ve read that.” For me, this is a dream of mastery that I might demonstrate my competence and legitimacy.
As you’d see with a child prodigy or an authoritative old master, the encyclopedic command of a person who simply knows things, in and out, in exacting minutiae as well as at scale and scope, seems an appealing quality. They can get things done because they do not lose their orientation; their map of the world is accurate, extensive, and well-annotated. This is, anyway, the marvelous aspiration I’d long held. But the past decade of my life has involved a great deal of adaptation, growth, strengthening … and humbling. I have also had to accept more of my limits, and accept facts about myself that perhaps to an outside observer were more apparent (or less important) than they were to my ego.
The purpose of citations in scholarship is to mark what doesn’t need to be marked in casual conversation so that others can “track” references. (How frequently readers ever follow up is, well, dubious. If you’re specifically doing research, following the footnotes is an established practice. But all scholars become familiar with the problem of seeing an argument paraphrased and cited, then going to the source, and realizing the paraphrase isn’t accurate—or at least, doesn’t provide what we’d say it provides.) We write and cite so that we may forget while preserving the line of reference, but the learned expert does not forget—not too much. I, meanwhile, have a shaky memory.
Retention is one important part of reading, true, but it can be illuminating to rack focus on the goal of retention: that reading allows one to be a person who has processed this work, rather than merely cite it. Sure, an erudite person with a great memory can do both, but for the rest of us, citation is a tool, not an end. I never digested that lesson as well as I should have. I’m slowly learning it better.
There are benefits to being a partial opsimath. It keeps one youthful in the right ways. The reason I think of myself as a partial opsimath is that I’m arriving late to so many things that I wish I dove into in childhood or adolescence, or at least in my twenties. Plus, again, one learns one’s limits. Marilynne Robinson read Moby-Dick when she was nine; I was a precocious kid but certainly not that precocious.
Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, where David Lynch also spent a part of his early life, and which is not too far from where my parents grew up. (I only lived the first few months of my life living in that part of the country.) Her father worked in the logging industry, which was true for some of my own family line, as well. Maybe one of her relatives and one of my ancestors shared lunch from time to time? Maybe she, like my parents, knew some people who appeared in the 1967 Disney movie Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar.
Another helpful lesson, one that also doesn’t come easily to me: it’s OK to read slowly. A lifetime of slow reading will still allow one to read much, much more than the average person. Guy Davenport, in his essay “On Reading,” reports,
I read very slowly, and do not read a great deal as I would much rather spend my leisure painting and drawing, or writing, and I do not have all that much leisure. And as a teacher of literature I tend to read the same books over and over, year after year, to have them fresh in my mind for lectures.
Recently I’ve read some things by Riva Tez, entrepreneur-investor-writer-tech person, and one of the things I’ve enjoyed reading by her is an essay on sleep, with these lines about the morning:
It’s the time of the day I experience most vividly. Out of a silent slumber, I notice every sound, every hot water pipe turning on, every parent taking their child to school and every bird with his coo. I experience the same thought each time — “You should sleep more”. It’s a weird paradox to be so in awe with life that it leaves you detached from important sleep.
To be in awe. That’s what the days are for.
Many mornings I’ve wondered if anyone else shares this version of insomnia. It doesn’t stem from anxiety or sadness, it stems from a totalitarian joy that fights closed eyelids. There’s so much to learn, so much to see. A hundred years of life couldn’t satiate every curiosity, every instance of possibility, every sunrise.
Something else by Tez that I found very thought provoking is her recent piece on pathogens, their possible links to seemingly non-communicable diseases, and scientific/epistemological anarchism.
Although it seems like he hasn’t published much the last couple years (or maybe I don’t know where to look), this fella Lou Keep (or maybe it’s “Lou Keep”) put out a lot of words on interesting issues about society, economics, nihilism, etc., several of which are clustered around something called the Uruk series. I’m a little late to the party on this one but I’m curious to read more; I’ve started dipping around, not necessarily in chronological order, and there are a number of deep insights and ways of framing issues.
Recent reading: Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Edward Dahlberg’s The Leafless American & Other Writings.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with some lines from Jean Giono’s The Open Road (translated by Paul Eprile for the NYRB release), where the easygoing but energetic protagonist describes appreciatively a section of the late night he has playing cards with some locals:
“In my opinion, there’s only one way to eat: Never let your belly stand in the way. If it acts like it’s full—who cares? Keep on going! You’ll be amazed by how much you can still stuff in. What we most need—each and every one of us—is strong blood. As much of it as possible. A lot of the things we love can demand it of us at any moment. How stupid of us to miss out on these wonders for want of a few drops of blood. Eating sorts all of this out.
“We’re storing up a lot of strong blood in this place hemmed in by snow, by night, by boredom … We load our bellies with morsels of home-cooked wild boar, swigs of wine, slices of bread soaked in pepper sauce, the way you stuff the pockets of your hunting jacket with handfuls of cartridges. And we don’t save anything up—we’re not hoarders. We’re not here to bottle up our blood, but to scatter it to the winds. There are still heaps of food on the table when we already have cards back in our hands. One more mouthful, and we’re cutting the deck. We’re setting the wheels of fate in motion. We’re in a hurry and we have every reason to be. You’d have to have spent your whole life with your ass stuck to a chair not to understand why.”