The Art of Reading

Damon Young

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780522867619
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In The Art of Reading, philosopher Damon Young reveals the pleasures of this intimate pursuit through a rich sample of literature: from Virginia Woolf's diaries to Batman comics. He writes with honesty and humour about the blunders and revelations of his own bookish life.Devoting each chapter to a literary virtue—curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice— The Art of Reading celebrates the reader's power: to turn shapes on a page into a lifelong adventure.

THE LUMBER ROOM

Sherlock Holmes was a bizarre man, but mundane in at least one way: he saw books chiefly as handy things. ‘A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use,’ he said in ‘The Five Orange Pips’, ‘and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.’ The lumber room was set aside in old estates to store tables, chairs, commodes—a storeroom of convenience.

For Holmes, reading was simply a technical skill for finding facts. He picked up the crime reports and agony aunt columns (‘always instructive’), and that was all his forensic craft required. Here, the reader is purely a collector of obvious things, and the only doubt is deductive. Texts lose their signature anxiety, and become utilitarian mind furniture.

No doubt the written word can be straightforwardly useful: instruction manuals and digests, signs and plaques. But libraries are also constellations of wonder, reverie and shock. Conan Doyle’s younger contemporary Saki echoed this point in his typically wry short story, ‘The Lumber Room’. Set in a fictional seaside town, Jagborough, it has a young boy punished for his transgressions. Having dumped a frog in his bowl of bread and milk, Nicholas is left at home while his cousins head off for a beach visit. As his aunt tries foolishly to keep him from the gooseberry garden, Nicholas steals a key and lets himself into the mansion’s locked lumber room. He finds a tapestry depicting a hunter, dogs and stag. Sitting on a roll of Indian hangings, Nicholas starts to daydream. Perhaps the hunter, crouching in long grasses, is a poor shot. But if so, how will be protect himself and his hounds from the wolves, prowling among the trees? Nicholas moves on, still hidden from his aunt. He discovers candlesticks, a teapot, a box of figurines, a book of exotic birds—‘objects of delight and interest claiming his instant attention’.

The boy is never caught. And as the family sits to an awkwardly silent tea, Nicholas too is quiet. ‘It was just possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds,’ wrote Saki, ‘while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.’ The fantasy continues.

This is the thrill of pages: the discovery, often in childhood, of things that incite invention; the hint of dangers privately confronted, when one’s family is far away; the fantasies that one chews on like a bone, while fidgeting with dinner.

To write about my library, which informed and inspired The Art of Reading, is to describe a lumber room much closer to Nicholas’s than Sherlock’s.

LIBERATING PAGES

Aesop’s Fables is a compendium of dubious morality tales, which often tries to edify with agony and humiliation. My Collins (1951) edition, illustrated by Harry Rountree, has a huge, heavy font—perfect for the cumbersome messages of prudence.

The Book of the Thousand and One Night is pure adventure. Richard Burton’s famous translation, considered pornography when first published, is still a marvel. If not for his fidelity to Arabic language and culture, then for his playfulness with English. My edition (Arthur Baker, 1953) also has atmospheric illustrations by WH Cuthill, which included the—to my childhood eyes—exotic kingdom of bare nipples.

While her prose and prejudices have dated, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree remains awesome: branches that take unaccompanied children to unbelievable lands. Dorothy Wheeler’s drawings, in my printing (George Newnes, 1947), still have a simple charm.

But they cannot compete with the whimsy of EH Shepard’s sketches for Winnie the Pooh (Methuen & Co., 1946). The enchantment, verve and melancholy of AA Milne’s series still get to me, particularly as I now have an Eeyore and Tigger of my own. (Thank you, Nikos and Sophia, for listening.) All these children’s stories are available in many editions, new and second-hand—and often for free, digitally.

The same is true of Conan Doyle’s tales. My edition of The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes (Octopus Books, 1986) still has its faux-gilt page edges and ersatz leather cover. But his works are available cheaply in all formats. While these detective tales cannot compete with the psychological nuance and forensic precision of modern crime stories, Sherlock Holmes remains a singular hero—for his idiosyncrasies as much as for his genius. Doyle’s style, a hundred years on, has much Watson to it: robust, reliable, a little huffy.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (Penguin, 2000) is thick with reflections—on memory, pre-revolution Russia, butterflies, exile, for example—and polished character portraits, all in his masterful prose.

Germaine Greer’s recollection of literary hunger is from The Pleasure of Reading (Bloomsbury, 1992), edited by Antonia Fraser.

Maps and Legends (McSweeney’s, 2008), by Michael Chabon, contains some typically thoughtful observations about pulp, comics and identity (especially Jewish). I have not quoted from his brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Fourth Estate, 2002), set in the United States during the golden age of superheroes. But it prompted me to seek out his ideas about popular culture—I was not let down. If my nods to Batman, Ghost Rider and Green Lantern leave you smiling or just curious, pick up Chabon’s novel.

My first introduction to Orhan Pamuk was My Name is Red (Faber & Faber, 2011), a thrilling story set in Ottoman Turkey, often told from the perspective of things: a coin, a tree, a corpse. His essays on art, literature and life, Other Colours (Faber & Faber, 2007), lack the surreal luminosity of that novel, but include some fine discussions of his craft and divided world.

Alongside her culture and acumen, Edith Wharton was a brilliant prose stylist. Her A Backward Glance (Century, 1987) provides a glimpse of her life and era, but also provides paragraphs I can drink without becoming full. The same publisher has issued many of Wharton’s works, and they are readily available second-hand.

My opinion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is given in Philosophy in the Garden (Melbourne University Press, 2012). Suffice it to say that his Confessions (Penguin, 1953) is the timeless record of a modern mind revealing (and concealing) itself with talent.

Every issue of The Paris Review includes interviews with authors: from novelists, to playwrights, to biographers. For anyone interested in the genesis of literary nous, this magazine is a quarterly boon. The interview with William Gibson is in issue 197 (2011), but many other authors mentioned in The Art of Reading feature in archives. Dennis Nurkse’s ‘Learning to Read’ is from 213 (2015). If subscription is too expensive, good public libraries will have current and back issues.

I have reservations about Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy and personality, which I detail in Philosophy in the Garden. But his work on writing and reading is excellent. What is Literature? (Philosophical Library, 1949) is a bold account of literature’s two freedoms, written in the same clear prose he celebrates. Sartre’s Words (Hamish Hamilton, 1964) is a profound and strikingly written story of the philosopher’s childhood and maturation. As with Nausea, this is Sartre at his best: fictionalising his own impressions.

I have my wife’s paperback of Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin, 1972), the first volume of her autobiography. Less grandiose but more moving than Words, Memoirs is also a rich record of pre-war France.

Herbert Marcuse’s discussion of ‘holiday reality’ comes from The Aesthetic Dimension (Beacon Press, 1978)—still a striking defence of art’s autonomy, and still available with its aesthetically challenging original cover of black, red and burnt orange.

Dickens’s reflection is from David Copperfield, which drew heavily on his own childhood. Having worked in a second-hand bookshop for years, I can say with some weariness that Dickens is everywhere, and cheap.

Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Bookcase’ is in his typically suggestive collection Electric Light (Faber & Faber, 2001). Look for the neon salmon cover.

The description of poetry snatching back the restless word comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Philosophy and Poetry’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful (Cambridge University Press, 1996), edited by Robert Bernasconi.

My ideas of objects are echoed in Levi R Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011). Bryant is part of a growing philosophical trend—often called speculative realism—that tries to do justice to the universe beyond human consciousness, without lapsing into supernaturalism or naïve realism.

Marcel Proust’s On Reading (Souvenir Press, 1971) is typically Proustian: books as repositories of the lost past. It is also, in this edition at least, a beautiful thing: mottled emerald and burgundy cloth.

Hannah Arendt only briefly discusses the written word, but The Human Condition (Doubleday Anchor, 1959) is a classic analysis of modern life, and the loss of freedom. My old paperback is held together by tape, but a revised edition by Chicago University Press (1998) is available.

Stoppard’s quip is from The Pleasure of Reading.

On dementia and reading, studies include: Hui-Xin Wang, Anita Karp, Bengt Winblad and Laura Fratiglioni, ‘Late-Life Engagement in Social and Leisure Activities Is Associated with a Decreased Risk of Dementia’, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 155, Number 12 (2002); Joe Verghese, Richard B Lipton, Mindy J Katz, Charles B Hall, Carol A Derby, Gail Kuslansky, Anne Ambrose, Martin Sliwinski and Herman Buschke, ‘Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly’, New England Journal of Medicine, Number 348 (2003); Anita Karp, Stéphanie Paillard-Borg, Hui-Xin Wang, Merrill Silverstein, Bengt Winblad and Laura Fratiglioni, ‘Mental, Physical and Social Components in Leisure Activities Equally Contribute to Decrease Dementia Risk’, Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, Volume 21, Number 2 (2006). The last paper reports that different kinds of leisure—physical, social and intellectual—are more effective together than alone. A more cautious finding is from Hui-Xin Wang, Weili Xua and Jin-Jing Peib, ‘Leisure Activities, Cognition and Dementia’, BBA Molecular Basis of Disease, Volume 1822, Issue 3 (2012). This review of various studies concludes that research requires more standardisation and specificity. For example, the kind, intensity and duration of ‘mental activity’ (which includes reading) is not specified.

I discuss Haruki Murakami’s excellent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage, 2009) in How to Think About Exercise (Pan Macmillan, 2014).

Anne E Cunningham and Keith E Stanovich’s ‘What Reading Does For the Mind’ is in American Educator, Volume 22 (1998). The research on brain connectivity is from ‘Short-and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain’, Brain Connectivity, Volume 3, Issue 6 (2013). The authors are Gregory S Berns, Kristina Blaine, Michael J Prietula, and Brandon E Pye. The work on theory of mind is from ‘Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’, Science, Volume 342, Number 6156 (2013), by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano. The latter two studies are fascinating contributions to the science of reading, but the conclusions hyped by the popular media are dubious.

John Dewey’s Art as Experience (Minton, Balch & Company, 1934) offers a theory of aesthetic experience without idealistic fantasies, fetishism of genius, or obscure jargon. My clothbound first edition is still in good nick, but newer copies are about.

My edition of Homer’s The Iliad (The Folio Society, 1996), is what we called, in the second-hand bookshop, a ‘jelly bean’: embellished, expensive, a little pretentious. But Robert Fagles’s visceral modern translation is marvellous. Grahame Baker Smith’s stark illustrations add to the atmosphere of mythic immediacy. The same translation is also available in paperback, by Penguin. For a rhyming Iliad, Alexander Pope’s stately eighteenth-century translation still sings.

Deborah Levy’s psychologically astute novella Swimming Home (Faber & Faber, 2012) cut me into tiny pieces. Prose like industrial diamonds.

George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Penguin, 2010) lacks the polish and long view of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but as a portrait of literary hackery and ressentiment it is spot on.

Like his Batman: Year One (DC, 2005), Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (DC, 2002) is a bleak but sophisticated graphic novel, which uses diverse prose and visual styles to tell the Batman story. While recent runs by writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo have deepened the Dark Knight mythos, Miller’s work has lost none of its original power. Read him alongside anarchist Alan Moore to compensate for the former’s fascist tendencies. Typical of its era, Ron Marz’s Green Lantern #54 (1994) mistakes superficial brutality for psychological realism.

My Nicomachean Ethics is part of the two-volume The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton University Press, 1984), edited by Jonathan Barnes. Aristotle’s discussion of hexis also appears in On the Soul. All Aristotle’s lectures are available new, second-hand and as public domain downloads. The university editions often have more careful translations, as well as commentary. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has a brief but succinct discussion of hexis in You Must Change Your Life (Polity Press, 2013), in the chapter ‘Habitus and Inertia’.

One of the finest modern interpreters of Aristotle is virtue theorist and communitarian Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue (Duckworth, 1984) made a massive and needful contribution to contemporary ethical debate. MacIntyre’s essays, including those on the nature and value of ethical debate itself, are collected in The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and Politics, both published by Cambridge University Press (2006). His A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1998) is a succinct critical guide to the history of moral thought. His Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989) is an excellent guide to the different (and rival) traditions of justice.

Like those of MacIntyre, Gi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Liberating Pages
• Curiosity: The Infinite Library
• Patience: Boredom at Buckingham Palace
• Courage: The Ninja of Unfinishedness
• Pride: Gospel Untruths
• Temperance: Appetite for Distraction
• Justice: No I Said No I Won’t No
• The Lumber Room
• Acknowledgements