How to read well amidst infinite streams of information and data? Arriving at the closing pages of a long book, Anna Karenina in my case, feels like more of an achievement than it should, but it is all too easy to get distracted. Paradoxically, inhabiting the world of a long book is one of my favourite ways of spending time on this planet. This year I would like to embrace the resilience found in the pages of long stories like War and Peace and Moby Dick. Slowly journeying between the extended anchor points of the opening and closing pages of long books, percolating through time, allowing the linearity of time to be dissolved. Less is more and more.
Anna Karenina gave me a richly varied cornucopia of bilious old men, strutting peacocks, beautiful women, awkward peasants, uncouth nobility, cattle, rural politics, scything techniques, abundances of a different type, but what lingers are the exquisitely and precisely rendered emotions. Beware of the green-eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on. In Anna Karenina, the Lord of Jealousy steps in, inhabiting the text as a fully developed character. You might read any number of books on the subject, but come to Anna Karenina to truly understand its malignant force.
This year begins with Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., translated by Ronald W. Sousa. I have been unable to read beyond the first paragraph, which I reread, inscribe into two different notebooks and now into the internet. It recalls a passage I love from Michel Serres’ Thumbelina: I am sometimes unknown to myself and on display at one and the same time. I exist, therefore I am a code. I am calculable and incalculable, like a golden needle, plus the haystack in which, buried, its brightness lies hidden.
Thank you to those who sent messages in response to my last post. Your interest is greatly appreciated. It is always gratifying to know that these words travel through different conceptual worlds and times to enrich readers.
I know what you mean Anthony- I always feel very pleased when I manage to ignore the distractions and sink myself in a big book. I’m going to try more of that this year!