Read only one book in a lifetime
How a person reads more than one book in a life time mystifies me. How do you do that? I have a friend who pops up before me every week or fortnight, eyes glimmering with ephemeral enthusiasm, and declare that he had read Sun Tzu, Seneca, or Nietzsche.
Give me a book worth reading (there are only few of them) and come by in a week or fortnight and you will find me at the first sentence, marvelling at the creation of the sentence, at how experience is curved out in the language. A sentence is a creation. In its creation, it serves to communicate a certain mind’s interpretation of reality — whatever sentence we write or say is never the reality, but its speaker’s or writer’s interpretation of reality. It finds expression from the choices available in language to construe or interpret experience. It is as much about what are constituted in the construal of experience as it is what is left out of it. A sentence is a droplet of life, full of life. How do we skim through a sentence? When this sentence is part of a larger whole called story, text or discourse, a central purpose binds it with the rest of the sentences. In this regard, the sentence becomes like a frame of image in the complete movie that is the text. Reading, for me, becomes about taking in the camera angle, the lighting, the backgrounding as well as the foregrounding of every frame. The first sentence is even more significant because reading it is all about understanding why the writer begins the story where she does in the infinite interconnectedness that is life. Why does “1984”, for instance, begin with this line:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Why begin the tale on this particular day, and pick out only brightness and coldness of the day from all the infinite stimuli that is there in that spatial and temporal setting. What is the meaning behind relegating the rest of the contextual information out of the construal of experience? Why use stative verb ‘was’ in the first part of the sentence and the dynamic verb ‘striking’ in the second? If I were in the world of the novel (God forbid! Or am I already?) and watching the experience go by before my eyes, would I frame the experience as the narrator does? These and other innumerable ideas about the first sentence would be racing up and down my mind by the time you come after reading your eleventh book.
In short, you have to ruminate upon every sentence until you take in all the juices it has to give. The conventional reading of a book every few days is shallow. I consider it as swallowing with out chewing. It is nosiness at best, not reading. It does not benefit you; it might momentarily excite your conscious mind like narcotics and induce you into euphoric long-winded lectures, but whatever knowledge you got soon evaporates for the shallow readings do not allow you to commit them into your unconscious mind. Reading should be all about committing knowledge to the unconscious mind. Only then does the knowledge sediments into your character. Otherwise, it becomes like the seeds that fell by the way side in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13: 4):
4. And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.
I recently embarked upon (re)reading the good book, the Holy Scripture. A week in, I have not budged any further than Genesis (1:1).
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Contained in this simple sentence, of 10 words in English, is the most important event in the history of the universe, its creation. What does it mean though? In the beginning? What does ‘created’ mean? Does it mean ‘thought it up’? What does that make God – a thinker – a conscious mental actor? What about the infinite circumstance that must have been there in the creation of the universe – all the questions on the how, where, why, etc. What does all the omissions signify? Who is the narrator, by the way? Is the knowledge reported to the writer, Moses, by the Holy Spirit? If so, what is the meaning behind the Holy Spirit construing the creation of the universe in the way it has, while science proposes the clamorous nebula hypothesis? Have all humanity who has ever read past this chapter have the answers to all these questions?
I wonder how people find time to read so many books when there is a book of far greater significance than even the Holy Scripture open before their eyes every day, the book called Life. Every little book you boost of reading is but the distillation of knowledge, poetry, meaning into human language from this book. Writers read this book.
The masses shun the book because they cannot read the language it is written in. The language is sincere, silent, still observations. The masses are illiterate in this language; it is like Sanskrit to them. This is so because they lack the willpower to learn and exercise language of so much mental and spiritual efforts. Instead, they are happy to let the writers do the ‘heavy’ readings of Life and distil whatever they read into the conscious human language they can easily access.
Writers, however, have proved to be as shallow readers of Life as the readers of their works. How else can a writer write more than one book in a life time? (A writer has to earn their living? Go find another occupation then! ). The temerity of it! Yet, there is a charm in our attempt. We are like a baby trying to write for the first time, marking indiscriminately across the page. We call that writing. No wonder readers can only have the patience to skim through them. To write, however, is to be able to get into the spirit of what you wish to write and to let that spirit, out of its infinite intelligence, dictate your writing. You would know the spirit-dictated writing in the way the words seem to fly, how the pages are on fire, and how the words commune with your unconscious mind. These are, as a matter of fact, the only books worth spending a life time reading and ruminating upon; that is if you ever wish to read more book than Life.
In every writing, however, one invariably sees the marks of human impatience, tampering with the slow, gentle way the spirit weaves writing to its wholeness; one can even see the exact points where impatience sets in, the writer grabs the wheel of creation in their human hands, and confine writing to the narrow horizons of their conscious understanding and ability. Their writing at these junctures nose dives to mediocrity.
The sorry state of writing is but an extension of what language in general has become. Language is what differentiates human from animals, yet language use is reduced to tweets like birds.
Reading and writing were our last strands of our connection with the spirit after we shunned religion. They were meant to be means to grow in knowledge and spirit. However, they too have been compromised. Writers have become furtive, impatient readers of Life. They run to their publishers with half-baked ideas before they fully soak in the lessons Life has to offer. For most readers, books have become badges to decorate their room and their ego. These are readers who change their colour with the colour of the cover of the book they happen to read.
