On not reading:
… what is interesting about a text – which is not the work itself but the qualities it shares with others – might be best perceived by a critic who closes his eyes in the presence of the work and thinks, instead, about what it may be. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (29)
There was a time when I read books in, shall we say, the romantic manner, which is to mean all the way through and usually in one sitting. I had, at one time, an enormous patience for spending hour upon hour with a single text; on rainy days, I sometimes still do. But more often than not, I read a dozen books or more at once, flitting from one to the other, looking for the connections, finding the spaces between them where I can inhabit safely. This is one way of “not reading” which Bayard rescues and promotes, in that it rejects the singular book in favor of the entire library. And, perhaps more importantly, it recognizes that to lose oneself in another’s work is to fail to make a work of your own: only by pushing books away does the writer find her voice.
At its root, this is a vision of reading couched in discontent. It is discontent – or, more completely, a sense that any given text is insufficient – that makes us close the book at hand and tilt our head back in thought. What resides on the page is often just a catalyst for further thinking (or writing). It’s what feeds the culture around books – for a book that is never talked about is like the tree that falls in the forest: it leaves behind no evidence that it ever made a sound.
One of Bayard’s arguments in How to Talk About Books is that the difference between reading and not reading is hard to pinpoint. If I only skim a book, does that count as reading or not reading? If I read a book years ago, but can no longer remember it, isn’t that more akin to a state of not reading than of reading? Or, what if I have never opened a particular book, but can still speak about it authoritatively, because I know what other books it is similar to (or, put another way, I know its location in the library and what it means to be in that place) – is that a book that I have read, or a book that I have not read? Does it matter?
Someone with whom I spend a great deal of time is a significantly less avid reader than I am. Our arrangement is such that I read vigorously – making numerous recommendations about which books he should read – wherein he reads about one out of every dozen or so books I push in his direction. And yet a strange consequence of this coupling is that he can speak as authoritatively and compellingly as I can about books of which he has never so much as cracked the spine. It’s as if I’m reading for two, and the act of reading expands from the initial contact (me, alone, with book in hand) to the later event (the two of us, talking about books, drinking wine). In a certain sense, he has read these books, in that he is as familiar with them (albeit through different means) as I am.
Underneath this theory of reading is an elevation of the ideas that a book espouses over the experience of reading it. The challenge I see therein is that ideas cannot be completely decoupled from the act of reading – cannot escape the material condition of the written language from which they are born. For me, especially, an idea must be judged in part on the merits of the words that describe it. The best ideas are therefore married to the most beautiful language; a divorce diminishes them both.
Traveling
The paradox of reading is that the path towards ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in – a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of a part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (178)
When I was thirteen, I became a vegetarian. The decision was rooted in my inability to reconcile that one could have deep emotional feelings with one animal and yet kill and eat another. To a thirteen-year-old, there could be no greater hypocrisy. (How funny that we despise hypocrisy when young, yet grow to expect and at times enjoy it later.)
I remained a vegetarian for many years, largely out of habit. When you give something up at such a young age, it becomes accepted, normal. I forgot what it was like to ever be a carnivore, and still have only hazy memories of eating meat when I was younger.
Sometime in my twenties, I started to read seriously about food. I was struck by Richard Manning’s Against the Grain, a revisionist history of agriculture that challenges much of the accepted wisdom about why humans relinquished the life of hunters and gatherers. But rather than force me to reconsider what I believed about agriculture, it revealed to me that I believed nothing: this was a corner of my life that was, at the time, unexamined.
Towards the end of the book, Manning swiftly dismisses vegetarianism as a utopian ideal born of the city. One could argue this point (indeed, many have), but I recall being surprised at my reaction: I was insulted, but did not want to argue him. I wanted to agree.
I continued to read and to think about food, learning to interpret the effects of a decades-old food bill on what we eat each day, and gradually softening the boundaries of my vegetarianism to admit fish. I joined a CSA, perhaps the ideal way to eat locally and one that (Manning be damned) is really only available to city folk. Then one day, without ceremony, I had a steak.
When I came around to reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I had already reached a place where Pollan had little to teach me. I was deeply suspicious of the organic economy; I was committed to sustainable agriculture in my daily life; I bought ramps and celeriac and grass-finished beef from the farmer’s market, and sought out pastured milk and cheese as much for the flavor as the ideology. And yet, Pollan’s storytelling about Polyface Farm, and his experience in the abattoir, gave form to those beliefs in a way that no personal experience could. With his text, I could take the measure of myself, could see my own beliefs in the light of another.
And yet, as with Heisenberg, each measurement brings with it an unshakeable uncertainty. We are more than the sum of the books we read, and yet books are the means by which we form the equation. It is necessary then, as Bayard argues, not to read in stasis, but to travel through books – to use them as guideposts but never to set up camp.
This weekend, all of the reading and writing and talking about food that I’ve done for the past ten years was realized in a single tiny plate of celery, gelato, and apple – one course of the Farmer’s Feast at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It was perhaps three bites, but it arrived with the force of thousands of words. And while it brought to the fore just how much these books had affected me, it also revealed how much further I’ve traveled. And yet – how much further I have still to go.
