1 post tagged “the usual”
One of the problems with accumulating five billion books at a pace that far exceeds your ability to read or even skim them is that sometimes— on the days when the Internet is particularly dull— you become aware of them all. It's one thing to be aware of the long books in languages you don't read well— hello there, Decameron in Italian and impulse-purchased Czech fiction from Prague! An attachment to books as objects, or a need for exalted goals: such things can easily be forgiven. What I mean is more the realization that you really wanted and intended to read every book you bought, and you still want and intend to read them, but you have to admit, when pressed, that you have no idea when you'll start or how long it will take or in which order you ought to proceed; that book collecting is a planless and depraved thing to do, a genuinely philosophically interesting vice, perhaps, but a particularly crazy one when you have access to giant university libraries anyway.
Still not clear? Here are some particulars.
I. Redundancy. I fall somewhere between preferring to read original Spanish and German texts (almost always more elegant prose, good language practice, etc.) and preferring to read English translations (comprehension still better). French and Italian I read at a snail's pace. Trying to improve my skills in all these languages in parallel is a constant struggle. But I have the will, and, therefore, I also have copies of Stendhal, Proust, Boccaccio, Celine, Baudelaire, Dante, Svevo, Flaubert, et al, in originals and translations. In German almost everything is doubled. In Spanish, which I read fairly well, I have a few opportune translations. Furthermore, in a belief that I would simply learn Latin one day, much as a ptarmigan turns white in winter, I began encouraging the accumulation of Latin Loeb editions. They are shiny and red like berries. Any old ptarmigan would bite. But it creates a dilemma:
Do you:
A) read Ovid in English, glancing at the Latin from time to time? Advantage: knowing something of Ovid; increasing cultural literacy. Disadvantage: inauthentic!
B) read Ovid in Latin? Advantage: authentic! Disadvantage: you have to fucking learn Latin first. How hard can it be... when you're learning three other languages simultaneously? "Impossible" is not a bad guess!
Option A would commit me to approximately three or four hours of concentrated reading. Option B would commit me to several years of concentrated language study. Naturally, I choose Option B. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say, "yeah, I think I've got the hang of it, this is easy, thanks," and then when you go to see him and ask him how the fishing has been going he'll shrug and give an evasive answer and then conspicuously eat potato chips for dinner. If that analogy isn't quite clear, for "potato chips" read "blogs."
I've been over some of this terrain before, but I don't think I've made it quite clear how much this whole complex represents the ultimate collision of my overweening ambitions and my terrible, terrible time-management skills. I'm beginning to think that I need to see books not as physical objects on a shelf but as reified units of time: then I'll have a better sense of what exactly I'm trying to do with my life by building this fortress.
II. ADHD. Some people are not passive learners; when reading, they use a variety of different technologies to interact with the text: they highlight book passages, take copious marginal notes, write computer programs to organize their book notes, etc. Not me! I am special. I am an impatient, scatterbrained, dialogic reader who uses no technology whatsoever to help maintain the dialogue. When a text makes me think about something, I put it down. Sometimes I pick up another book and read a few pages of that and then think about it. Fascinating! Fascinating, in some profound and ineffable way. Oh my head. I had better check my email now. Where was I? It is fucking amazing that any ideas get through these buffers at all. Well, no, it's not, because I can sit still and read when I need to, but the bouncing-around happens quite often, I fear.
III. Rereading. I have these friends who like books— novels, generally, or poetry— enough to read them several times over. From the best books, you continue to find wisdom and beauty and humor and pathos with each reading. Fine. But I find myself wondering: how many of the books on these shelves, purchased in the hope that they would be good or great, will merit extensive rereading? If it's even 10%, man, I may as well just stop buying new books now. Especially if that subset includes the Latin books.
Now, what was the point of all that? That I wish I had more time to read? Well then, off we go—
