Reading

Perusing books —

Alberto Manquel wrote books devoted to the art of reading—historical panoramas of libraries including his own, the chronology of reading from the earliest pictographs, and diaries of his reading habits. Reading his words and insights about both the writer and the reader reminds me of the task of a reader. Without the reader written words perish, lie fallow. The reader imbues the writing with her own experiences, idiosyncrasies, and peculiarities.

I find myself seesawing between fiction and non-fiction.

It is almost Passover and I am busy putting together a Haggadah, buying matzah, taking out recipes. We will eat matzah for Passover week as a reminder of how quickly the Hebrew people left Egypt — no time to let the bread rise. If you fully observe the holiday all bread and flour products will be removed from your home—even the crumbs.

I read these words in The Same Embrace by Lowenthall.

The scene is a concentration camp at Passover.
"In the dark chill of the barracks the rabbi rose..... He was skinny now, almost too weak to stand.

"Into the dimness he lifted something up. It was a wedge of bread, no bigger than his fist. It was his own stale end of bread, saved from supper. The rabbi held the bread to his face.

This, he said, in what remained of his voice, this that you see. This is matzah."

The written word sizzles on the page. I cry when envisioning the scene. It's a simple scene described in spare language.

There are writers who write for an audience unable to read their words. The reader becomes the voice of the silent ones. Wallace Stevens said, "The word is the making of the world." How can I read without a visceral reaction? Some words force me to make a moral decision.

Jeremiah 23:29 : "Like a hammer, it explodes the stone." The rabbis said this meant that one read and read a text until it gave forth a plentitude of meanings. That is the way to read. Some books require the merest of taps to reveal their meaning while other require persistence and rereading. It is in the rereading that I find the rivers of meaning.

Life, like a story, begins in medias res. To start at the beginning is impossible. The writer knows this and drops the reader down into a stream mid-way between the beginning and the ending.

"He was forty-eight, a fisherman, and he never caught a significant fish."

Barry Hannah "Getting Ready"

"Yesterday afternoon the six-o-clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit"

Truman Capote "Children on Their Birthday"

I am seated at the coffee house writing when I group of six people arrive. This is lunchtime and I assume a prearranged date.

One man is bald, another has a long crew cut, one is losing his hair, another younger man has a beard and shoulder length light brown hair, and one wears his hair parted in the middle. A lone woman with long curly hair says, "Awesome," but I never heard what was awesome. Perhaps I'll write about hair.

Sentences remain in my mind, creating patterns I wander through.

In Gilead, Marilynne Robinson writes, "History could make a stone cry."— an invitation to stop and contemplate history.

I don't need to consider the far removed past; I remain within the last ten years and weep for the ravaged lands, the stony faces of the victims of genocide, the thirst for power that propels men to ignore morality.

A line written by David Berger comes to mind when I think of history: "We cannot allow the trees or even the groves, to persuade us there is no forest."

One line leads to another, permutations of meanings colored by my own experiences, and I travel through a network of thoughts.

The writer lets the reader see a tiny piece of the story; the rest is resting beneath the water. A reader plunges down through the words, through the simple sense and discovers a multitude of meanings. My imagination defines new dimensions—a warren of meanings.

I read somewhere that Miriam Rothchild spent twenty years studying and cataloguing her father's flea collection. Then she produced an illustrated catalogue of that collection.

How many questions remain unanswered. My mind takes on a flurry of activity. Questions tumble about—unanswered save in my imagination. I even want to take a furtive look into her bedroom.

Angelo Manquel in his book The Library at Night says "A study lends its owner, its privileged reader, what Seneca called euthymia, a Greek word which Seneca explained means 'well being of the soul,' and which he translated as 'tranquillitas'. Every study ultimately aspires to euthymia..." Did Miriam Rothchild attain euthymia?

Joan Didion writes: "Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them."

I love to lose myself in those places.