Reading READING I used to read quite a bit. �What stopped you?� �Television.� At times I must read every word on the text. Then at the same time I appraise what I have read. I read the credits, the preface, and the outline and then if I have time I read the title. If all of this is appealing, I just stop. At other times I willingly abandon uninteresting sections of books, of whole texts, of each and every passage. In truth, reading is the good life. Reading is a good way of supporting writers. Some people think a writer is just a person. But an author � who is the same as a writer, same amount of letters, virtually the same meaning, with virtually the only difference being their place in the alphabet. Of course the place in the alphabet has very little meaning to a person who cannot read. But a person, who cannot read, will not be able to know what the next paragraph says unless, of course, someone who can read tells him. Idiocy is not just award err, a word in a book, but idiot in the dictionary comes between the word idealism, and the word zoology. I have a wonderful story to tell you about a day in the zoo, but I think this tale will go to long if I attempt to tell it. There is a library (my second synagogue) just down the street. I occasionally have a dream of a time when there will be a library in every city. I inhered a library from my grandmother. She was a voracious reader. My grandfather say us she was also a vicious reader. She read a book a week, and I do not mean books like Nancy Drew or Mother Goose. I mean she had the entire collection of Shakespeare and Milton as well as being a subscriber to four newspapers, six magazines and grandpa says she read every jar and on every jar and can which entered her house. That very library lives, does not just sit in, our house. My daughter Sara was quoting Homer before she could ride a bicycle. My daughter Michele was perusing James Joyce before she was out of dyers. And my son Dan began reading Sports Illustrated waiting in line at the pre-school cafeteria. I trace myself to the books I dismiss from the collectors of odd, mysterious, and otherwise wonderful texts. I live to add to the collection. I may not add anymore �classics� but I do express who I am and who I want to be thrught the eyes of Borges, Saki, Vonnegut, and Rosenzweig. My reading is a legacy of my being passed over, passed down, and passed around to those who I trust to modify my hearts ands bones. If you begin reading a book, which does not capture your interest, put it down. There are too many excellent books to be read in a singe lifetime. If someone tells you that a certain book is a class work, and a must read book, but you are not inspired by it, go read a book which may not be a classic but which inspires. Classics become such because of their effect in a large number of people. But the last time I saw you you were exactly like all readers of books, a single reader. Yet is a text is suitable to an era, several areas, perhaps things have changed significantly to make the classic irrelevant. When I was just a youth, a child, really an infant, long, long ago, we lived in a four-bedroom house. Each our three children has his or her own bedroom. Mine was the smallest room of all, a mere eight feet by sixteen feet. My one sister in the old days had an elegant twenty-four by twenty four feet bedroom (which I jokingly called the racket ball court. My other sister slept in an upstairs room that was virtually a barn � forty-eight by sixty-four feet. I have always refereed to them as fat. I always will. It is not their fault they were as they were. You might call them big-boned. In fact, the fault lies in the accounts (I assume) that found me in the smallest room in the house. The room was painted blue. When evidently moved into the attic (aka the �barn�) after my sister moved in a house with seventy-six rooms, and I returned from, discharged from, got the hell out of the (United States of Americas) army the smallest room in the house was no longer Dave�s room but the blue room. When my wife and I moved from our last apartment (one hundred and sixty rooms) into our first house, the smallest room was known as the blue room. It was beige but about the size of the room at my parents house. My sister, may she continue to have children into the next century, put the nomenclature blue on the beige room. It caused comical confusion (three �C� words in a row, lets see you do that, and still, make perfect sense) to everyone who visited us. Our good friend Barry was generally confused when; helping us move a new television-radio-tape-recorder- record player in, he asked where something or other belonged and was told �In the blue room.� We only had one child when we moved (but she was as active as six) into a house with one room to store books in. We had both just gotten out of college, and still had our college books (her from four yes and me from not only six years of purchasing, buying, obtaining in other diverse, as well as devious manners� brought books, and books, and books, and books into the �SMALL� house into the large (thank God) marriage which was living in another bedroom housed around the library. Slowly, over the proceeded years we filled the bedrooms with children, and the library was exiled, misplaced, forested and dedicated to the basement. Exile is too pour (or do I mean poor) a word? Well we poured the book in the basement where I keep my papers, pens, and pretty purple (as well as red, black, green, orange, yellow, white, brown, chartreuse, and oriole colored covers of books, Books, BOOKS. I cornered off the basement into three sections. One section remanded the laundry room, one became the playroom. The third section, the one just a little bit larger than the play area, I swear just a little bit, is where we keep the books, our books, the books of my wife and three intelligent children, the kind of children who need, want, desire and frequently purchase book. I have had to remind my wife several times we do not, I will not, and it is immoral to throw books on the shelf. (Note to the reader: our author tried to say throw books �away,� but he fell into fainting several times and, eventually, had a heart attack.). When we moved to our second house (the kids were all in school and schools have the nasty habit of giving books away every year, in every class, and every time we keep the books). At least we had a two-car garage, a very large play area, and a place (after six or so years of marriage) all around the house, with which we place our books, or what we all now have learned to call our library. My library is beneath the living room, which is under our bedroom, which is under wood called a roof, which is under the sky, which is under�. (We now turn you over to our metaphysical portion of our paper). (Note to the reader: the potion mentioned in the previous sentence is refrained from print due to the overwhelming pages and pages of abstract and mythical phial, errr sorry I mean Metaphysical jargon which was necessary to even make a small sense of what was meant. But life is too short. My library is under the living room, which is under our bedroom, which is under (see the paragraph just above the one you are currently reading). It sits there just like the unconscious (or the unconsciousness), which animates both the rooms above it. It�s where one retreats to treat oneself to the it! (Yet I feel irresponsibly free to remove any book of my choosing and carry it into any other room to read it (or do anything I want to do with it.) My sisters are still fat. My library continues to grow. Have you ever noticed how close in spelling is (or do I mean �in spelling are) library and liberty. I would continue to take about the closeness� of spelling but I am afraid --- well I am not really afraid so much as I am merely in tension) --- to continue talk about metaphysical stuff, things, and/or simple - - - - than not. Nevertheless (which is much more than nonetheless) catalogue houses and publishing companies continue to send me their contest offerings. I buy! I am told that if I would quite buying they would quit sending (even thought this failure to buy has never stopped the telephone solicitudes who insure I do not purchase any of their product by a) Calling at dinnertime, b) Calling when I am engaged in doing something I believe in important c) Calling me by the wrong name d) Not being enthusiastic about their product e) Being too extremis, too enthusiastic about their product� f) Asking if they might call back later when you are not so busy, and they might be placing me in an awkward situation (position) of not wanting to say �no� so I tell them something I really do not want to tell them just to be politer g) Actually calling them back. The problem is that the majority of these books does not get read, or are read sporadically. It is not the case that I am wielding my life (although my life is being dawdled away, ebbing, flowing, floating, away, i.e. age ward). Rather I spend, my time (moor my mind) at the public library! Why read all these books? � Which I own, posses, have, cherish, honor � when I can obtain nearly any book I want, desire, think about, hear about, dream about, or hear about. I would dive in ten-hour search for three and seven days a week. But I do not have the right books. I do not satisfy my interests on a deeper level so I need not generalize works on special subjects, but intricate works on extranet special subjects. I own quite a few books � s �habit� which I virtually excuse to family members (as if have books required excuse, although I occasionally am dithered by the necessity of the term �owing, as of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens and others are as primary property, or worse, �bought and paid for�). My excuse is �its better than cocaine.� I also own just about everything in translation by Henri Bergson. I do not agree with his metaphysics, but long ago I read his �Creative Evolution,� and was impressed not so much by the logic of the argument (which I cannot remember) as by the style, or manner of weaving numerous points into a single mosaic. A series of �I� statements started with I want to be well read. I am a writer in my own span of time. I want to be informed. Now I want to be read well. It is interesting to remember where the �diverse� works derived. I inherited a single volume of Shakespeare from the same person (my grandmother via my grandfather) that I inhered the three-volume edition. Only I passed these books did I begin to purchases the single volumes. The very same single volumes were, of course too large to lug around in order to read at buss stops, restaurants, movie theatres, airports, hospitals, sporting events and/or churches, synagogues, and mosques. But the three editions would have been ideal. Nevertheless, I excuse my behavior (as if filling ones library with Shakespeare requires excuse!) with the thought that the single volume had wonderful commentaries (most one page back editions from Sweden, or Luxembourg. One day after seeing Mel Gibson in a rendition of Hamlet I went out to a neighborhood bookstore and bought yet a fifth version of the story in play form. The reading library is in with self-wonderment. I might understand having three or four of the Odyssey. Murray, Fitzgerald, Butcher, Lang and Bullwinkle might be useful (now, since you are reading in my past, the appropriate form of English may have been �might be� but these are not useful comparisons nor are the useful camorrists. Well what they may be, and what I am talking about is nothing then useful comparing of nuances in order to build (A) the multiplied language into a panoply of understanding (to write a new text) or, (B) to choose a pre-given understanding so that a cumulated choice (a new text) may be assumed. But, no, what I have are several copies of the collected works of Shakespeare: a single edition, a three-volume edition (the historical, the comedies, the tragedies) and paperback versions of each. Also I have collected works � versions of Lewis Carroll, a volume of Alice in wonderland and the annotated Alice. Upstairs we have four books shelved that contain, first the Talmud by Socino and various paper coved books we have obtained over the years and two units of the priceless books I inherited from my grandmother. My private stash is randomly divided into the categories litrerature, religion, philosophy, politics and psychology. (Note how many intelligent book categories begun with the letter �p.� Psychology and polities make sense, but why is the other word not spelled filosophy. There are many fine words which begun with the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. Look in any dictionary and you will see such fine, favorable, fantastic, forms of English words with an �f� in the beginning. I say randomly because as frequently as I go throught and analyze an order (including a species of special books such as �books to read next�), books find there way elsewhere. Thus it is not difficult to find a text by Lacan (in translation) next to a Dostoyevsky. Although the Lacan was randomly stuck there in a fit of inattention, there does seem to be logic! A poetic logic! A book of (by and from [i.e. out of the hands of]) Freud may suit next to a book of Marx as if each were trying to asses the other with a better s�ances of what is truth. I am surprised when this arrangement occurs that each does not explode off of the shelf. When I discovered it, I planted a tree to give good luck to the Maccabean people. This discovery was discovered when I was discovered in the Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. I enjoyed this primarily at that the time because of the word �complete!� Here it is! Everything! Just go ahead! Analyze, digest, scan, associate , detail, synthesize, ameliorate, dally and synopses. Nothing is missing. It is �complete� not in the sense of finished (for I am graced, then with some insight I shall begin to do nothing except something interring and kinder than interring to say) but �total� is for Emily Dickinson, Blake, Rembrandt, for I love all the poets not because I am partially adapt at reading poetry � I am not � but because only their works can be collected, for the most of them, in a single edition. Gods bless each of the worlds contained on a single page. It is like spotting a complete life in a small area. My wife frequently criticizes me because I do not read very much fiction. While it is true I do not read very much of the popular pulp put out by so many moneymaking presses at the rate of seven billion words per minute, I do read literature and it is that the percentages of literature I read is dashingly smaller than the percent of scholarly books I enjoy. There are, after more Colin Wilson�s, Northrop Frye�s and Lionel Twilling than there are of Franz Kafka�s, Jorge Borges or James Joyce�s. Think of it. there is only one Wm. Shakespeare (according to most critics) but I have a book length segues of commentaries written, authored, or made up by people who either had, changed to, stole good names. There are these such as A.C. Bradley, Frank Kemode, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Laurence, Kenneth Meir, and P. Tusitalia. Not to mention all the ones who are listed on my reading list. Of critics, I put on the top of the list, Cain ben Adam. In second place comes each and every mother. I have Coplesrtons �A History of Philosophy, and Landscape of Fear by Yi Fu Turn, in paperback. The division between paper and hard shows no cognizance of merit. I recognize that Alfred Wehneits 1866 Andersons Tales (Bell, London and Dolby) is yet readable whereas Swami Pravbantansda and Frederic�s Manchester�s. The Upanishads (New American Library, 1957) or even Carl Sagan The Dragon of Eden (Ballentine) 1977 paperbacks have loosened pages and will eventually be covered which contains numerous disconnected sheets. Still paperbacks are good for quick reading and disconnected levity. Hardbacks are for longevity (or hold up a wobbling table). I tend t read from the library. Hey I just noted how close are the spelling of library and liberty. Oh well. As I am reading from the library in my liberty, I hurry to read because if I take a rest I may happen to go to a nearby bookstore. If you are anything like me, you may have noticed that new bookstores are made modern with an inside restaurant. Philosophy is next to religion (and not because Immanuel Kant came along with whats-his-name-Hegel) and all of that is next to literature (just read a book by Sartre or bishop Tallywanger. Rituals are virtually integrand with philosophy and politics. But does thus make religion a philosophy as philosophy is a religion? Else, one could not be sure where to place Manistique magical and manic �The Spirit of Law,� and Marx�s (Karl not Groucho) Poverty of Philosophy, Cassier, Myth of the State, and Horkheimer, Adorno, and Hobbes (or Rousseau�s Autobiography). Also, several books on oriental religion � okay on paper which specks about � okay, okay paper does not speak, but there is a mysterious way of getting information across on and about the section of psychology. Have you ever noticed how the art of psychology attempts to become philology? I do not find it untidy that at on the same shelf as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and Leigniz there I find the Berlitz book of French. Perhaps French is the way of philosophy � yet my Deleuze, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty are elsewhere (with John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frederick Nietzsche) I feel neither guilt nor shame having Paul Tillich� there volume Systematic Theology next to Hans Kung Does God Exist? Nor do I either have or feel shame because I have Thomas Browns Religio Medici next to Maimonades Guide for the Complex. Each of them were physicians. I am curious however why Isaac Singer is in the religious section as opposed to the litt�rateur (or every the deep mystical) section. Probably because of criticism. In as much as I occasionally run into, or develop, or categorize problems we are thankful for whatever we have. For example, do I put Thomas Mann�s Reflection of a Non-Political Man in literature, or politics? Mieders Prentiss-Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs waits not to be read, enjoyed, suckled, appreciated, marveled over, but to be memorized. What happens if you are in a situation and you need, have the opportunity to settle an argument or simply show off? Corbel�s The Facts on Facts on File Visual Dictionary is marveled over, appreciated, suckled, enjoys, but I find it notoriously difficult to memorize figures at best, my memory of what the state of Ohio looks like is a shield. My visualization of Italy, of course, is as a large boot kicking Sicaly, but that of Florida is like a dangling sock. California is an arched back. In fairness, it must be mentioned that hardbacks are not immune to time and change (Especially change). They can be placed (actually, I have taken a hard bask up stairs and place it somewhere but others displace it). They can, God forbid, become coloring pads for children. They can, with a worse fate, be loaned to friends. What hardbacks do not do, which paperbacks do, is deteriorate right before your eyes. (This does not mean your eyes deteriorate). This leads us to ask the opposite question: what happed to all those hardbacks? Millions are printed each year, yet the supply to any given household does not noticeably increase. I routinely check out (not all in libraries, nor in bookstores but in places where they have statistics on such things) the books in the homes and house to which I am occasionally invited. Every house that has a bookcase is portentously in possession off at least two or more books. It is safe to say that year after year, their collection of hardbacks both does not, and/or do not change radically at all. One rarely hears about even the most psychomotor, potentate, psychotic person somehow getting of his or her voluminous hardback editions of great American political figured in exchange for stale poet, or vise versa. To frequently answerer the question we would have to factor in the statically increase of new family unites, but increasingly there does not seem to be enough families created each year (not counting those broken up per annum) to accommodate the fifty or so books per existing family, created every quarter. Most books do not perish because of negligence (especially since the most action most shelves see is an occasional dusting). This leads me to one terrifying conclusion. People throw away books! Worse yet, if there can be anything worse, perhaps they do so by thinking, �I am done with this book,� or �I�ll never read this book,� or �Had this book for forth years, darn thing won�t disengage. This distinction between paper and hard back is reason enough to phrase the interesting texts once put out by Dover, and to lambent lowly their apparent discontinuousness. Paperback books are built to last practically never. I should mention Kurt Vonnegut. I have most every paperback he wrote (if, of course, it was published). I have most of Swift, most of Ben Johnson, most of Shalom Alechem, most of Charles Beaumont, most of George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Pynchon, Dante, Emil Fackenheim (who I saw in person), Ovid, Whitman, Saki, Wiesel, Paul Goodman, Sartre, Camus, Tolstoy, Freud, Marx (Karl, not Gaucho), Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Kaplan (see Steve I told you I�d get your name in print) Borges, Wittgenstein, Author Kosher, errr Koestler, Peter Schuller, Kiekegaard, Soren, Achad Ha�am, Hannah Arendt, Bev Newman, Erich Fromm, Martha Wolfgang., F. Nietzsche, Kafka, Spinoza, Maimonades, Gabriel Marcel, Alan Paul Friedman, Leigniz, Heidegger, Debby Trotta, Heidegger, Hume, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, James Joyce, Bernard Longer, George Bernard, Steven J. Lacon, Colin Wilson, and others. Harry Katz. Ronna Fishman. Most, if not all, are by far the best. Of course there are a few who I would like to dedicate something more than a book to (so sorry Harper and Row) Gilda Seltzer Schwartz (oh you already have a book dedicated to you; well, you deserve two), Sara J. Schwartz, Michelle Elizabeth Schwartz, and Daniel Ross Schwartz. Further who can forget, Maverick (Heines Vol Geckchosen), Buba, Ellie, and Quinn? Yes I am prior, prank, on the prowl. Why not have ready to hand everything by Paul Ricouer, John-Baptist Metz, Winston Griffin, Aquinas, Jefferson, Dorothy Parker, Beckett, Luigi Pirandello, Harold Bloom, Tolstoy, Jacob Neusner. Immanuel Kant, Cicero, Anatolia France, Benj. Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, etc, etc. After all, one-day children will grow and we will have to do something with those empty rooms if we are to justify keeping the house. Do you think I cannot make a selection? But yes, I choose them all! One might find oneself reveling in a text (and if reading is not a celebratory event, one ought simply not engage in a reading that will end up being incomplete). A text must have something added to it, however if it is not to become revealing. Enthusiasm only results from the clutter of mind. Laughter results from thinking about everything on your, mind. insanity results from thinking too much about anything. If the hitching process were clear, or the obviius obviius, there would be no reason to get excited. Excitement only results when one are on the terrain of new discovery, when something above and beyond �the clear.� There are several (thousands) of platitudes, maxims, proverbs and other saying to express that which someone thinks is important. Emersion, in a book I inherited from my grand mother, Edith Polmerance Oscherwitz, had the saying, which, as soon as I write, type, print on this sheet of paper will become a quote (unless there are some purists reading): �The sense of the world is short � Long and various the report.� �Eros� Jorge Luis Borges said, in parentheses: (To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way, the art of criticism.). Another author, Delmore Schwartz (no relation) says in �The Ego is Always at the wheel,� edited by Robert Philips pg 2 (New York, New Directions: 1986: �By 1938, I had read so many books that I wrote one.� The two suggest that an author is one who brings pebbles thrught the query of life. Jean Amery, in his At The Minds Limit, New York; Schocken Books, 1986) says, �No one can become what he cannot find in his memories. (Page 84). Now this is satisfying but another author, whose name is being held by request, says, �People with out memory There are great highways on the way to life, but no one remembers them, so if a book were written everyone would think of it (the book, not life) as science fiction, much like the Huxley brothers, and the Darwin brothers. The Smith brothers were scientists of the cough. There also may other brothers in the history books but it is not Wright to speak about all of them. Not all the Smith Brothers were writers and one or two, well it cannot be two if we are talking about brothers who are twins, one or, --- some of them have not written books. Page 516 or Tristram says (well in truth pages cannot speak) �That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident of my own way of doing it is the best � I�m sure it is the most religious � for I begin with writing the first sentence � and trusting to almightily God for the second.� (Ibid). Since I have used the phases �ibid� several times, I feel as if it is a vagabond truth to tell the reader just what it means. But I don�t know, so will you please excuse me for a few pages? Borges is correct, Borges is always correct. I have never heard him be wrong. But in this case, I use to have my maxim in first, from the early manuscripts thrught German ideology and Capitol. These lead seemingly to Kropotkin and the autobiography of Emma Goldman. One day, I arranged all the books so they scattered with Locke and ended with Milton Freedman (no close relation to Alan Friedman). Marx (not Groucho), through the great number of volumes was, as it were, arbitrary pocketed on the shelf. Now, a true anarchy resigns and all of the books are laid next to one another in no apparent order. It is as if to be a metaphor for a constant state of revolution. For any example there are page and a shelf of eastern texts, which leads into as it were, into Marx (not Karl) and which when the earth biomes as it were going toward magisterial notions. There are pages for Borges in columns made into volumes speaking about Kant, Hegel, Bertram Russell, and others, in historical order anarchy consigned on the bottom shelves of two cases. Above are all the political books, above the other on verbal metaphysics chaos of opinions, essays and literati criticism. In Seven Nights, pg 116, it says (in truth a human being says but in books without and windows, it is said that some bad and some good things happen, but that, in the long run, it would be �converted into words.� Conversion is quite like conversation in the way words are like peddles from the tall tree in the neighborhood. I routinely survey the collection and think: How lucky am I that I have saved the classics to read in my mid age. Which is another way of saying �I frittered away my youth, and all I read out of immaturity have new to be re-read anyway if I want to understand. Understanding is like a boat in deep water. Or to make sense, like a boat over deep water. Imagine these words really spoken in a book of everyday life: �You read too much.� I have to wonder just what too much is. Initially is would seem to be the opposite of �not enough.� But, you may have not enough money, but it is difficult to know what too much money its. I imagine when a boat is leaking and when the bridge is on fire and the like. Also is there too much or not enough friends in the world. This being said, can there be too much reading? Writing is a code for solitude. And solitude with a pen and paper, or with a keyboard solitude? Friends tell us that their six-year-old daughter, Rachel, will read daughter will read absolutely anything. -- Books, cereal boxes, road signs, newspapers, candy wrappers, newspaper, clothing tags, and so on. One day, my daughter Michelle wanted to talk to her, but she was reading � �And once she starts there will be no stopping her until she complete what she was reading.� They have a story which the tell about her picking up her sister, Channa�s third grade math book. She explained plot does not count. It is the roll and tumble of the words. Michael de-Montaigne says that a �friend:� of his, boasting that he had gone mad learning. It is really a shame that authors speak so little about becoming totally sane by reading. But this is because the author is the reader who is either insane or the reader. De-Montaigne does not tell. Gregory Clark (In �Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Reading (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) {page 14} says experience is ongoing by writing and the writers language is an external dialogue that the reader is able to join. Successfully reading a book takes more time than the occurrence of eyes passing along painted words and the mind making convections between what the words mean and associations with what is suggested. In correct reading, the implication is called forth more so than the explicate state. Another author says X. Statement X is simple, perhaps entertaining. Yet it calls for a series of Y�s. An excellent text calls forth Y�s long after it has been digested and put away. Good reading, however, calls forth an X: the writing in response. This is more than an answer. Y with Y is made to allow the original creator to create once again. But this time thrught me. (An excellent author could say what. Now this is interring. I know an English teacher who says continually saying �what� is a sign of ignorance or laziness. If you take a moment to think to answer will come. You are just lazy if you do not wait. Montaigne is largely a student of distressing, as one of the essays written by Hume and the speeches given by Cicero. Yet all theses authors are revered as one of the summations of antiquity, the end of midlevel and the beginning of the modern world. So many people in the literary world, especially editors but also some creative types, nod in vigorous agreement with the philosophers that if given the choice between possessions of truth, he would choose the latter. They nod in vigorous agreement. Yet of presented a rambling essay of insights, they call it ecliptic and dismiss its. It seems this type of mind would be absolutely horrifying if they stood in the midst of a library. Perhaps all forms of biography, including autobiography, as ways of standing inside a library and surveying where and how we fit in. What is masterful ingenuity to one series of people is unintelligible to another. The mere phrasings of the antinomians ought to alert us to who themselves are the more insightful, the more creative.
Copyright © 2003 G David Schwartz G David Schwartz |