Reading for Your Life

Consistent readers of this still new blog (that would be me and a certain redhead), will have noticed how often I center a post on a quotation, most often from a book I am reading at the time. Occasionally, I have thought this unfortunate, a clear indication that most of my thinking is derivative, feeding off of others like a piglet at mealtime at the state fair. But then almost all human activities, even the most creative, are derivative in one way or another–and are better for it. Few people are more obtuse (and often boring) than those who believe they are thinking or doing something completely new.

And so I use for this post a passage from Dickens, re-discovered in the very entertaining new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs (read anything by Jacobs and you will be glad you did). Jacobs cites the scene from David Copperfield in which David sees reading as having saved his life when, as a child, he was oppressed by his life living with the Murdstone family.

David lists the many characters from literature that became his companions—from Tom Jones to Robinson Crusoe, saying that “They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time” (Jacobs, p. 32). He concludes, “This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always arises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”

I love the phrase “reading as if for life.” If it makes no sense to you—and it won’t for many intelligent, good people—then you are not one of  The Fellowship of the Book. I am not referring to the People of the Book (though some of us are members of both groups)—a term usually applied to Jews, Christians, and Muslims—but to those read as if their lives depend upon it—because they do.

Jacobs suggests that readers of this kind will always be a minority—in any time or culture. It is the one subset of human beings for whom I have unmixed affection. If you are a omnivorous reader, I will forgive you almost all your other sins (not a power I actually possess, I hasten to add) and ask you to forgive me mine. We are like Kafka’s hunger artist–we do it because we have no choice.