Housman: It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God. It doesn’t meanI don’t care about the poetry. I do.
— Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
I’ve learned at least that other people do exist, and that selfishness, although it cannot be denied, must try to be clear-sighted. To enjoy only oneself is impossible, I know, although I have great gifts in this direction. If solitude exists, and I don’t know if it does, one should certainly have the right to dream of it occasionally as paradise. I do from time to time, like everyone else. Yet two tranquil angels have always kept me from that paradise: one has a friend’s face, the other an enemy’s. Yes, I know all this and I’ve also learned or nearly learned the price of love.
— Albert Camus, from the preface to The Wrong Side and the Right Side
The last days of dear old winter. Much of this year spent in a haze, reading little but well.
I read Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a remarkably fine and wise contemplation of self-knowledge and the abyss of depression. Much of this explores the reduction of the human. The book also echoed a sentence I once transcribed from an attempt to read Hegel: This release of itself from the form of its own self is the highest freedom. That reading of Hegel resisted coherence, but that sentence, a coalescence of poetry and philosophy, cut so deep I have transferred it from notebook to notebook.
The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw plays with light and attentiveness. I entered the aura of the text and did not want to leave. It is an extraordinary work that slips away from genre and definition. It works on the edge of autobiography but never quite removes the mask.
Spinoza looms over this year’s reading following my fascinated scrutiny of George Eliot’s translation of Ethics. I am slowly reading Eliot’s Journals. Unlike Woolf’s diaries, these are economic, writing that subtracts ornament and distraction, but remains somehow rich and expressive.
Dostoevsky’s novels, wrote John Bayley, “are full of a stifling smell of living and littered with constitute daily reality,” as compared to Tolstoy who has, “houses and dinners and landscapes,” which is a striking and nicely balanced comparison.
There is a singular scene in Anna Karenina which marked my transition from curiosity to a genuine fondness for Tolstoy’s story. The noble Levin scythes hay with the peasantry, transitioning over the course of the long day from a sense of detachment to a more instinctual rhythm. It is a similar metaphor to Hamlet’s “the interim” as the place where contentment is found. As Tolstoy wrote elsewhere, “True life is not lived where great external changes take place.” It is a quite extraordinary scene and set my decision to read more Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace.
Normally at this time of the year I am brimming with plans for next year’s reading, but apart from wishing to read through those Shakespeare plays I have not read and more of Samuel Johnson’s Lives, I have few other settled intentions. “Age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch.” As I turn fifty-nine, a deep sense of mortality is shaping what I read, and I find myself turning more to those works of art that have eluded me to date. There is more urgency to try to read well. I read more books (87) this year than any other, but feel that I read too much. With a handful of exceptions, the most profound and interesting reading this year was all older books.
Time’s Flow Stemmed feels a little rudderless at the moment but still appears to be of some interest if judged by 1,200 subscribers and 1,800 visitors per month on average, but I have no point of comparison. If any readers would like me to respond to specific questions about my reading life, please either leave a comment or send an email. I still clearly feel a need to write into the internet, as manifested by the occasional post here and my sporadic social media presence.
His style of conversation was popular in the highest degree and unscholastic; so much so, that any stranger who should have studied his works, and been unacquainted with his person, would have found it difficult to believe, that in this delightful companion he saw the profound author of the Transcendental Philosophy.
—Thomas De Quincey (The Last Days of Immanuel Kant)
The cooler air sharpens thought. I turn from early Anita Brookner to Thomas De Quincey, who I expect will remain close. His piece on the final days of Kant gathers alongside Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, read recently, still unsettled within me.
My grandmother used to tell me that people are sensitive to emotions such as rage, pride, or possession long before they become sensitive to nature, light, or colour. A sort of narrow anthropomorphism, if one were to consider the beliefs of the elders about how we are not born human, but rather progress into our humanity as life passes.
—Christina Tudor-Sideri (Under the Sign of the Labyrinth)
The thought that we are not born human but must move toward it — through error, through feeling — disturbs the easy fictions of beginning. In reading too, there is a slow, uncertain progress: not acquisition of knowledge, but a movement deeper into the common languages of loss, wonder, rage, bewilderment. Sensitivity to light and colour, to nature and silence, comes late. It is not given. It is not guaranteed. It must be entered, crossed toward, if crossed at all.
To read the ancients is not to master a world, but to become vulnerable to one. What lingers is not only what they said, but how they said it: the cadence of loss, the pause before a name, the long breath that holds a thought across centuries. I remember reading St. Luke late one evening, the room already in shadow. The text slowed me, something in its rhythm resisting paraphrase. I stopped, not from distraction but from a kind of awe.
Reading becomes an act of attunement. Not simply to meaning or context, but to tone, silence, and recurrence. There is a phrase of Josipovici’s that stays with me: “we are made to leave the prison-house of ourselves.” But it is not a release into clarity. It is something more tentative. To read wholly, to read through, is not to illuminate the past but to be touched by it, shaped briefly by a world not our own.
“Reading the entire works of ancient authors, attuning our ears to their way of thinking and speaking, we are given entry into worlds which, but for these writers and their works, would have been lost forever; we are made to leave the prison-house of ourselves and are touched by the world.”
—Gabriel Josipovici (Vibrant Spaces, from The Singer on the Shore)
Proust hears more than the syntax of scripture. In Luke’s Gospel, the colon halts not just the grammar but the reader, transforming text into chant. His attention rests not on what is said, but on the reader who stops, breathes, and intones. The sentence becomes a threshold, not of logic but of invocation.
“It is not the sentences alone that trace for us the forms of the ancient soul. Between the sentences—and I have in mind those very ancient books that were originally recited—often in St. Luke’s Gospel, meeting with the colons that interrupt it before each of the almost canticle-like passages with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who had just ceased reading it aloud in order to intone the verses following it like a psalm that reminded him of the more ancient psalms in the Bible.”
—Proust (Journées de lecture, translated as On Reading by John Sturrock)
While reading Dante’s Purgatorio, I momentarily stepped outside the poem to consider the medieval concept of the revolving heavenly spheres, or superne rote. I usually prefer to remain fully immersed in a poem while reading, but on this occasion, I felt it would deepen my understanding. C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image proved an ideal companion, transporting me away from modern sensibilities and into the minds of the long dead. My curiosity was satisfied. Purgatorio, momentarily forgotten, yielded its place to a diverse assortment of ancient texts that Lewis skillfully employed to illuminate the perspective of a medieval reader.
“Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.”
This reflection on Boethius led me further from Dante and into the realm of The Consolation of Philosophy, a book that has brought me quiet enjoyment. In the following passage, Lady Philosophy appears beside a distressed narrator:
“Now when she saw the Muses of poetry standing by my bed, helping me to find words for my grief, she was disturbed for a moment, and then cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘Who let these theatrical tarts in with this sick man? Not only have they no cures for his pain, but with their sweet poison they make it worse. These are they who choke the rich harvest of the fruits of reason with the barren thorns of passion. They accustom a man’s mind to his ills, not rid him of them. If your enticements were distracting merely an unlettered man, as they usually do, I should not take it so seriously; after all, it would do no harm to us in our task. But to distract this man, reared on a diet of Eleatic and Academic thought! Get out, you Sirens, beguiling men straight to their destruction! Leave him to my Muses to come for and restore to health.’”
In an interview that eludes my current search, Pascal Quignard once remarked, “I am a Baroque artist. I seek intensity of emotion by any means necessary. I am not a classicist, I do not seek perfection. Baroque artists seek intensity, not beauty. If we can make people cry, we are happy.”
This reflection recurs in my thoughts and serves as a framework when approaching Quignard’s works. It seems that within the writings of any serious author lies a manual on how to read their work. Quignard’s prose recalls painting: fluid, unstable, occupying a space between philosophical discourse and fiction.
Many of the writings I most closely value share this expressive Baroque quality. In the introduction to <em>The Burglar</em>, Brigid Brophy writes, “Baroque is an open, sometimes explosive embrace of contradictions—intellectual and of feeling. Ambiguity and fun are its raw material merely. Its essence is the ambivalence, in full, deep psychoanalytic import, of emotions. It is a pair of giant curly brackets that clip together things irreconcilable.” This formulation captures the profound sense of astonishment central to the Baroque.
In <em>Passions of the Soul</em>, Descartes examines the initial moment of astonishment and the way it leads to other emotions: “Upon encountering an object that surprises us, something we consider new or vastly different from our previous knowledge, we are filled with marvel and astonishment. Since this can occur before we possess any knowledge about the object’s suitability or unsuitability, I believe that admiration is the first of all passions. Moreover, it has no contrary; if the object lacks surprise, we remain unmoved and regard it without passion.”
This sense of astonishment is what I look for in prose and poetry: an encounter with the unfamiliar, the unknown, engaging with questions of memory, existence, and the nature of consciousness. While this position may broadly align with the modernist tradition, the reading experience I seek is more accurately described as Baroque, a style apt for an era marked by the collapse of old certainties and a corresponding desire for re-enchantment and wonder.
“I myself am capable of dying of thirst in my own presence.”
When Joana speaks this line in Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, she does not emphasise it. It is not framed as a discovery or as a crisis. She speaks as if simply naming a condition that she has come to recognise. The sentence lodged itself in my thoughts, and I found it returning unbidden, often at quiet moments when the mind is less guarded. There are sentences that resist interpretation not because they are obscure, but because they refuse to reduce themselves to explanation. They remain precisely because they withhold that kind of closure.
The solitude described here is not situational. It is not the result of distance from others, nor of chosen retreat. What Lispector names is a more fundamental estrangement: the inability to draw near to oneself, even in one’s own presence. It is not a metaphorical thirst, but a description of a real privation that takes place within proximity. One can be present and still lack access to the sustaining parts of the self. That condition, spoken without adornment, carries more disturbance than any heightened language might have conveyed.
There is a kind of honesty in Lispector’s refusal to elaborate. Her sentences do not reach outward in search of connection or affirmation. They remain where they began, and they leave the reader to sit with what has been stated. This particular line does not offer insight. Instead, it gestures to a limit that is already known but rarely spoken. That is why it continues to stay with me. It neither demands understanding nor provides it. It confirms that there are conditions which language can acknowledge without resolving.