Lately I have been thinking less about what I have read than what is left behind. Words, atmosphere, scenes; a half-finished book that still calls out from the shelf. These are not gaps, exactly, but more like quiet companions.
Reading is not linear. I do not move from book to book as much as circle them. Some I finish. Some I abandon. Some I never begin, but carry anyway. A line from The Bloodstone Papers. A splintered word from Bernhard. Borges, reciting Beowulf to the sea.
There are books that ask to be grazed. Others that overwhelm, then recede. After Don Quixote, for a long time I could not settle. I moved between Woolf, Bernhard, Montaigne, Borges, distracted but letting other voices wash through me.
I have begun to trust this pattern. A reading life made of unfinished things. Not because they fail to hold me, but because they mark a different kind of presence. The unread book that shapes the space around it. The remembered detail that returns uninvited. The passage copied down for no reason I can explain.
What do we mean when we say we have read something? Finished it? Understood it? I do not know. Most of what I read feels more like listening. Sometimes, only a sentence survives. Sometimes, not even that. Just a tone. The feel of having passed through.
Reading, I began to think, is not passive but a form of exposure. The book becomes a companion presence. The reading is a form of shared attention, and what remains, if anything remains, is not content (horrid word), but contact.
Yes left with a feeling, an atmosphere, sometimes a place but not ‘characters’ in a relentless narrative arc. I’m very glad your blog is back.
Glad to have found a new hunger for writing into the internet. Thanks for being glad, Jill!
I think with the good books, we never finish them. So often when we go back to them they still have more to say.
The very definition of great art.