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Literary Review
VIESPOINT
I read therefore I am
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We all read to understand what and where we are. It is as essential to life as breathing itself, says PRIYA BALASUBRAMANIAM
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We find little in books but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
Joseph Joubert
KNEELING among some jasmine blossoms, a 17th-Century Indian poet strokes his beard as he reflects on the verses he's just read out aloud to himself, clasping the preciously bound book in his left hand. Standing next to a row of roughly hewn wooden shelves, a Korean monk pulls out one of many wooden tablets of the Seventh Century Tripitaka Koreana and holds it in front of him, reading it with silent attention. Drawing on his acting talents, Charles Dickens holds up a copy of one of his own novels, from which to read to an adoring public. Leaning on a stone parapet overlooking the Seine, a young man loses himself in a book held open in front of him. In these portraits and pictures, viewed by me over time, I see readers, and in their gestures the pleasure, responsibility and power that they derive from reading, that are common with mine. I am not alone.
In my adolescence, whenever people mentioned my so-called passion for reading, I would always start to bristle. After all, to be known as a book lover — how grotesque. To my hypersensitive ears, it was like being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world.
Shocking as it may seem, my real "love" isn't so much for reading as for pleasure — it merely happens that learning new things delights me, as do fast-paced stories, imaginative wordplay, and distinctive prose styles. Should I be congratulated for being a self-indulgent hedonist? I certainly wouldn't read books if they were boring, irrelevant and soporific — which is how most high school kids regard the classics of world literature. No, I read for excitement. Everything else is secondary.
A life-time habit
I first discovered that I could read at the approximate age of four. My father was largely responsible for this and in a tireless gesture of patience (for which I am eternally grateful to him) he would read to me from my favourite illustrated comic book. The Amar Chitra Katha was to me an endless source of entertainment. A popular comic book series, it deals with figures from Indian history and mythology, brilliantly illustrated performing acts that ranged from heroism to comedy. I liked my father to read fast, which he did, almost whizzing through pages of pictures that I had seen over and over again and the letters that I knew (because I had been told) were the names of the pictures, under which they sat. Yet, if he did miss a section or a dialogue, I would be quick to remind him of his slip. As my father explained the moving, talking images, I now knew (every time the pages opened to the now familiar pictures) what the shapes beneath them meant. There was pleasure in this, but it wore thin as eventually there was no surprise.
Then one day, from the window of our car during one of our many trips to visit my aunt in Mumbai's Malabar Hill (my early childhood being spent there), I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; the car stopped for a moment, just long enough for me to see, large and looming shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality. I had done this all by myself. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read. What that word was on that long-past illustrated billboard I no longer know, the impression of suddenly being able to comprehend what before I could only gaze at is as vivid today as it must have been then. It was like acquiring an entirely new sense, so that certain things no longer consisted merely of what my eyes could see, my fingers could feel or my tongue could taste, but of what my whole body could decipher, translate, give voice to, read.
The family of book readers that I was unknowingly entering (we always think that we are alone in each discovery, and that every experience, from death to birth, is terrifyingly unique), extend or concentrate a function that is common to us all. Reading letters on a page is only one of its many guises. The astronomer reading a map of stars that no longer exist; an architect reading the land on which a house is to be built, the weaver reading the intricate design of a carpet being woven, the dancer reading the choreographic notations, the public reading the dancer's movements on the stage, the farmer reading the weather in the sky — all these share with book readers the craft of deciphering and translating signs. And yet, in every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs and then decipher it.
The community of words
We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function. I didn't learn to write until later, until I was six. I could perhaps live without writing, but I don't think I could live without reading. Experience came to me first through books and my reading life gave me the same impression of flowing against the current, living out what I had read.
"To write down one's impression of `Hamlet' as one reads it year after year," wrote Virginia Woolf, "would be virtually to record one's own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know." For me it was somewhat different. If books were autobiographies then they were so before the event and I recognised later happenings from what I had read earlier in Pablo Neruda, Marquez, Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. Like Plato, it seemed that I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given as a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled and still formidable.
Reading gave me an excuse for privacy, my bed late at night became my safest and most secluded place for reading, in that nebulous region between being awake and being asleep. Many nights I would turn on my bedside lamp and try both to reach the end of the book I was reading, and to delay the end as much as possible, going back a few pages, looking for a section I had enjoyed, checking details I thought had escaped me. In fact, I don't ever remember feeling lonely, my books were good company. The psychologist James Hillman argues that those who have read stories or had stories read to them in childhood "are in better shape or have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced... Coming early with life it is already a perspective on life."
Worlds waiting
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwards. Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. Though I knew myself incapable of making up stories such as my favourite authors wrote, I felt that my opinions frequently coincided with theirs, and (to use Montaigne's phrase) "I took to trailing far behind them murmuring `Hear, Hear'." Later I was able to dissociate myself from their fiction; but in my childhood and much of my adolescence, most of what the book told me, however fantastical, was true at the time of my reading, and as tangible as the stuff of which the book itself was made. The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never, at any price, to be divided. The contents of every book burned within it, blazed from it; located not merely in its binding or its pictures, they were enshrined in chapter headings and opening letters, paragraphs and lines. You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines and reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at the spot where you halted.
I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page — as when I read Vonnegut, Maugham, O'Henry or Salinger. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinising the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure in merely the sound of the words or the clues, which the words did not wish to reveal, or which I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at. The second kind of reading — which had something of the quality of reading stories — I discovered in Lewis Carroll, Vikram Seth, Vassanji, Tagore and Nabokov.
Reading, to me, set one free, it gave one a freedom to explore thoughts and the world outside the context they lived in. This has its retributions in the political world we live in, from the banning of writers like Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen to the censorship of countless authors ranging from Neruda to Gorky over the years. But not only totalitarian governments fear reading. Readers are bullied in school yards and in colleges as much as in government offices and prisons.
Almost everywhere the community of readers has an ambiguous reputation that comes from its acquired authority and perceived power. Something in the relationship between a reader and a book is recognised as wise and fruitful, but is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding, perhaps because the image of an individual curled up in a corner, seemingly oblivious of the grumblings of the world, suggests impenetrable privacy and a selfish eye along with a singular secretive action. "Books, you have too many books!" my mother would exclaim in frustration. I remember being called a dreamer once by a maternal uncle when he saw me reading, as if my silent activity contradicted their sense of what it meant to be productive or alive.
Reading as subversion
The popular fear of what a reader might do among the pages of a book is as ageless a fear as men have of what witches and alchemists do behind locked doors. The recent attack by vandals at the Bhandarkar Institute in Maharashtra, is yet another example of destruction of information, of books that demonstrators have no idea about in terms of value and content. Their pillaging convinced no one. Thus reality — harsh necessary reality — was seen to conflict irredeemably with the evasive dream world of books. Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.
Told that we are threatened with extinction, we, today's readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Like the act of reading itself, the history of reading jumps forward to our time — to me, to my experience as a reader — and then goes back to an early page in a distant foreign century. It skips chapters, browses, selects, re-reads, refuses to follow conventional order. Paradoxically, the fear that opposes reading to active life, that urged my mother to request me from collecting way too many books that might not amount to much, recognises a solemn truth: "You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over," writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in The White Castle, "but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand the book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and , with it, understand life as well."
Litera scripta manet. Time to write a book.
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