A Selfless Art

The little flurry of quotes that I’ve shared over the past week was both a way to ease myself back into writing here, and a pointer to the diversity if ideas I’m trying to organise into a book. I’ve read a lot in recent years, both to nourish my thinking and as a refuge. There is more time and more need for reading when you live alone, and I’ve come to see how books have helped me negotiate the world since I was a child. As Mary Ann Lund writes:

One of the therapies is the act of reading itself: an activity that diverts, occupies, and consoles a grieving mind.

Mary Ann Lund, 2021, A User’s Guide to Melancholy, Cambridge p.4

It must be an illusion, but I feel I remember every book I’ve read, at least as an experience if not the content, because they are entangled with who I was when I read them.

But I read in different ways, something I saw when reading a blog by Paul Bloom, in which he reflects in the fact that most books are not read from start to finish. It’s a brave thing for a professor to say that

people don’t tend to finish books, particularly when it comes to certain sorts of non-fiction books. Certainly, I don’t tend to finish books. The picture on top of this post is from my office at work. I’ve opened just about every one of these books and read the first page. I haven’t finished more than a dozen.

It made me think about my own reading: like Paul Bloom (whose Against Empathy I have got to page 30 of), I often don’t read a whole book. I see my reading of non-fiction as part of a lifelong conversation with other writers. They say things that make me think—it’s why I read them—and I put down the book while I assimilate a new idea into my own pattern of thought. Sometimes I go back, sometimes not. Sometimes I go back many times over the years, still without getting through the whole text. In this, I understand Robert Burton:

This roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, & like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, & may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est [he who’s everywhere is nowhere], which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over diverse authors in our Libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgement.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Penguin Classics, p. 20

That magpie reading doesn’t apply to literature, which I was taught to venerate very young. If I read non-fiction for ideas and information, I read novels, poems and plays for their aesthetic value but above all for their expression of truths that cannot be shared in any other way. I read The Great Gatsby for the fourth time last month, and it gave me more than ever. Among other things, it helped me understand the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein although Fitzgerald died a decade before that man was even born.

All of which is to say that the words by other writers that I share here and in A Selfless Art are reflections of the conversation with other writers that had made me who I am. They, of course, are unwitting participants in this conversation: having had their say, they must accept that others will speak now about their ideas and, in the best cases, add to and develop them in new times. But it’s not in my nature to argue so the writers I cite are my mentors and good companions, my guides and, sometimes even my heroes, the people I am always glad to spend time with and want to share with friends.

(The image shows the bookshelf beside a chair where I like to read: a mix of books I want to read and old friends.)