Fertilising Pleasures

It may not come as a surprise to most that the word exhilarating shares roots with hilarity and hilarious. The assumption had been that exhilarating described a frothier emotion than “to make merry,” “to cheer,” or “to gladden greatly,” as defined by Skeat. Yet it is precisely that word that recurs when considering a certain kind of reading experience, the kind evoked by the work of Clarice Lispector and Gerald Murnane, two writers otherwise dissimilar. To gladden greatly remains no less accurate a way to account for the aftereffects of reading such transformative books.

This quality of transformation resists continuity. Their books cannot be read one after another. However exhilarating, the alteration of perception, even slightly, is not a sensation to be expended casually. It calls for caution, for distance. However many books by Lispector or Murnane are read, the world remains as they see it: unassimilable. Literature offers, briefly, an aperture into this difference. Such difference becomes a reason to read at all.

There are other writers whose work provokes prolonged reading binges, sustained across weeks or months. In those cases, the books are often consumed in sequence, sometimes repeatedly. These writers appear to share, at some level, a similar mode of perception. Their work is no less exhilarating in the moment but demands less effort to inhabit. Over time, those writers often seem to have been absorbed, or in some way outgrown.

The others remain. Their books are rationed deliberately. The reading must be staggered. These are the ones that shift perception and reorient language. Though rare, their fertilising pleasures are the most sought after.