I was shocked a while ago to hear literary and cultural critic
Stanley Fish say in a radio interview that he no longer reads poetry, except
professionally. When I worked in the academy I loved reading for a living, but I
didn’t want to lose my amateur enthusiasm for the printed word. In a busy life,
my slim bulwark against that huge loss has always been a quarter-hour each
night of plumping up a pillow and enjoying by a dim night light my bedtime
book.
I expect that criteria for a good bedtime read vary from person to
person, and that some people don’t distinguish at all between bedtime and
daytime reading. For me, however, my bedtime book is cracked open only in the
minutes before sleep, and the books that have kept reading for reading’s sake
alive have had a pretty defined set of requirements. They have to be outside of
my areas of professional interest (mostly rhetoric and American lit) so that my
motivations for reading are pure and my critical faculties don’t perk up too
much. They have to be interesting enough to keep me engaged at the end of a
long day but soothing enough to settle me in for a good night’s sleep. And I
need to be able to nibble away at them in fifteen-minute chunks without feeling
like I’m always forgetting what I read yesterday or breaking things off just as
they are getting interesting.
Ironically, the books that ended up satisfying these criteria have
been the very books I would have tackled anyway to be a broadly-read academic:
the classics. You’d think that short books would best lend themselves to short
reading spurts, but longer works predominated. Over the years, in fifteen-minute
chunks, I have read, among other books, David Copperfield, War and Peace, Montaigne’s Essays, Middlemarch, Don Quixote, and Anna Karenina. Consuming these books fifteen minutes at a time meant that their
reading stretched out over a long span of time, sometimes exceeding a year. The
ritualistic regularity of my reading time also meant that the books became integrated
into my life in a way that other books did not—my day was divided into waking,
sleep, and an in-between state that was sometimes infused with Cervantes,
sometimes Tolstoy, sometimes Dickens or Eliot.
I know, I know. This sounds like rich fare to sleep on. “And why
not wolf down some chocolate mousse or duck paté just before you turn back the
sheets while you’re at it?” some may say. But somehow reading these books at the same period
of the day that my parents would read fairy tales to me as a child makes them
pleasure and not work. Franz Kafka wrote that literature should be an axe to
break the frozen sea within us, and the crack of axe on ice shouldn’t be an
easy sound to fall asleep to. Yet there is something soothing about reading
literature in particular at the end of a harried day, even if the adventures
within the books are far from soothing for the books’ characters. No matter
what vicissitudes my day, or the world’s day, presents, it is comforting to
know that the world contained (and contains) minds who can produce such works—that
I am joining a silent audience of
readers who have enjoyed the books long before me, and that after I’ve turned
the last page these books will always be waiting patiently for whomever else
might be fortunate enough to discover them.
And so, after dreaming that shared dream, I slip off peacefully into my
own.
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