{"id":2306,"date":"2017-11-05T03:49:34","date_gmt":"2017-11-05T00:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=2306"},"modified":"2017-11-05T03:49:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T00:49:34","slug":"reading-in-search-of-a-balance-between-wisdom-and-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/2306\/reading-in-search-of-a-balance-between-wisdom-and-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading in search of a balance between wisdom and impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are moments when quite separate fragments of information or opinion come together and something hitherto only vaguely intuited becomes clear. Opening a new book called Forgetting by the Dutch writer Douwe Draaisma<\/a>, I am told almost at once that our immediate visual memories \u201ccan hold on to stimuli for no more than a fraction of a second.\u201d This fact\u2014our inevitable forgetting, or simply barely registering most of the visual input we receive\u2014is acknowledged with some regret since we are generally encouraged, Draaisma reflects, \u201cto imagine memory as the ability to preserve something, preferably everything, wholly intact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same day, I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov<\/a> on the Internet: \u201cCuriously enough,\u201d the author of Lolita tells us, \u201cone cannot read a book: one can only reread it.\u201d Intrigued by this paradox, I checked out the essay it came from. \u201cWhen we read a book for the first time,\u201d Nabokov complains, \u201cthe very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.\u201d Only on a third or fourth reading, he claims, do we start behaving toward a book as we would toward a painting, holding it all in the mind at once.<\/p>\n

Nabokov does not mention forgetting, but it\u2019s clear that this is what he is largely talking about. The physical effort of moving the eyes back and forth remains exactly the same on every reading of a book, nor have I ever found it particularly laborious. What is different on a second and subsequent readings is our growing capacity for retention, for putting things in relation to one another. We know the end of the story now and can see how it is foreshadowed at the beginning, how the strands are spun and gathered together. Rereading Mrs. Dalloway, for example, we are struck on the first page to find the comment \u201cWhat a lark, what a plunge,\u201d of Clarissa\u2019s sallying forth from her house into the street, aware as we now are that later in the book one of the characters will plunge to his death from an upper window. At once we feel we know the novel better, or at least are more aware of its careful construction. It is gratifying.<\/p>\n

Nabokov continues his essay, quoting Flaubert: Comme l\u2019on serait savant si l\u2019on connaissait bien seulement cinq ou s\u00ecx livres. (\u201cWhat a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.\u201d) The ideal here, it seems, is total knowledge of the book, total and simultaneous awareness of all its contents, total recall. Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension. The book, at once complex and endlessly available for revisits, allows the mind to achieve an act of prodigious control. Rather than submitting ourselves to a stream of information, in thrall to each precarious moment of a single reading, we can gradually come to possess, indeed to memorize, the work outside time.<\/p>\n

Since a reader could only achieve such mastery with an extremely limited number of books, it will be essential to establish that very few works are worth this kind of attention. We are pushed, that is, toward an elitist vision of literature in which aesthetic appreciation requires exhaustive knowledge only of the best. It is the view of writing and reading that was taught in English departments forty years ago: the dominance of the canon, the assumption of endless nuance and ambiguity, the need for close textual analysis. …<\/p>\n

Is Nabokov right that there is only rereading? Does the whole posture, both Nabokov\u2019s and that of critical orthodoxy, bear any relation to the reality of our reading habits, particularly in a contemporary environment that offers us more and more books and less and less time to read them?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to Douwe Draaisma. Why does he describe our inability to recall the sense impressions of a few seconds before as \u201cforgetting\u201d? …<\/p>\n

Of course one reason I won\u2019t be able to recall all my impressions is that they will have been substituted by others, equally rich, plus the fact that having written down a few elements of the here and now, any memory of it I might have mustered will be colored if not hijacked by that account. In dismissing the myth of total recall, Draaisma reminds us that the memories we do retain are largely fabrications, re-workings, shifting narratives, simplifications, distortions, photos replacing faces, and so on; what\u2019s more, that there is no reason to suppose that the original impression is intact somewhere in our heads. We do not possess the past, even that of a few moments ago, and this is hardly a cause for regret, since to do so would severely obstruct our experience of the present. …<\/p>\n

Words in general have a vocation for rearranging and fixing experience in a way that can be communicated across space and time. Yet often it seems that our experience of the words once written down is as volatile and precarious as our other sense impressions. No reader ever really takes complete control of a book\u2014it\u2019s an illusion\u2014and perhaps to expend vast quantities of energy seeking to do so is a form of impoverishment. Couldn\u2019t there be a hint of irony in Flaubert\u2019s Comme l\u2019on serait savant\u2026 (\u201cWhat a scholar one might be\u2026\u201d)? Is it really wise to renounce all the impressions that a thousand books could bring, all that living, for the wisdom of five or six?<\/p>\n

__________________
\nExcerpts from Reading Is Forgetting, by Tim Parks, June 2015, The New York Review of Books<\/a>. Thanks to Sylvain Rey for bringing this text to my attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are moments when quite separate fragments of information or opinion come together and something hitherto only vaguely intuited becomes clear. Opening a new book called Forgetting by the Dutch writer Douwe Draaisma, I am told almost at once that our immediate visual memories \u201ccan hold on to stimuli for no more than a fraction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,46],"tags":[5661,5663,2467,4723,5662],"class_list":["post-2306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-philosophy","tag-douwe-draaisma","tag-fiction","tag-reading","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-writer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}