The delights of reading

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth:

“There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

I think that is true. But, more importantly, I have never had any doubt that a person has a better chance of leading a successful and happy life and making a contribution as a good citizen if he or she is well-read.

If one had the power to give a child a single gift, the gift to choose would be a love of reading. That is a gift which incomparably combines immense usefulness with life-long access to intellectual stimulation, emotional delights, spiritual inspiration and unceasing entertainment. The usefulness comes in the head-start a love of reading gives a child in his or her education. A child who loves reading is going to learn faster and better than his or her peers who do not and is going to be able to retain and organize and express what is learnt much more usefully and with infinitely more effect than those whose minds are closed to books. I guarantee – all the top students in school examinations and at University are good readers and love books.

But as one gets older it is the intellectual delight and pure pleasure in reading that count more and more. How can one ever be bored if one loves reading? It is impossible. The imagination fills with a whole series of lives and ideas, old delights, new departures, fresh challenges, eternal truths. The joy of reading is unending. Let us trawl for wonders.

(1) W.H. Auden writes in his journal; “No woman ever wrote nonsense verse. Women are realists. I think if men knew what women said to each other about them, the human race would die out.” And again: “The poet’s one political duty is to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue – because when language deteriorates, force takes over.”

(2) People who love reading also write and receive letters and, these days, emails. An old friend writes from New Orleans and copies from a card in his hotel room: “We are all travelers. From birth to death we travel between eternities. May these days be pleasant for you, profitable for society, helpful for those you meet, and a joy to those who know and love you best.” Even in soulless hotel rooms you can find truth.

(3) In an essay in the New York Review of Books I find a verse by Lewis Carroll that goes to the heart of moral cowardice:

“When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark

And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark. But, when the tide’s high and sharks are around,

His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.”

(4) In Thomas Harris’s excellent and beautifully written thriller The Silence of the Lambs, the psychopath killer sends some lines of poetry to the FBI detective who has been his hunter and whose much-loved wife is now sick to death. The lines are from John Donne and you feel the truth of them – everything most tragic in the end gathers in the individual human heart:

“Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire

Shall burn this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire

That this her fever might be it.”

(5) I read an article about “miracles” and that shrewd old doctor of the ancient Church, St. Augustine, suddenly pulls me up with a sentence: “A miracle occurs not in contradiction of nature but in contradiction of what we know about nature.” Perhaps I should think about it a little more deeply? And I think of Einstein, the greatest scientist and mathematician of this or perhaps any age: “What we know about nature so far is still just a touch of water on the finger of a man kneeling and dipping his hand in a vast and unknown sea.”

(6) My eye happens to brush across a review of a book about, of all out-of-the-way things, The History of the Earls of Orkney. Not, one would have thought, the most appetizing of subjects. But no history of any man is dull and my mind lights up as I read about Earl Rogervald the Holy, full of righteous zeal and holy determination, setting out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but finding on his way, on the lovely green coast of France, the Princess of Narbonne. And very much he dallied on his way forgetting his pilgrimage in her seducing arms:

“Such slender delight to grasp and to cuddle”

so his chronicler truthfully records for us. He never reached Jerusalem.

Ah well, do not let us censure him too much, Earl Rogervald the Holy. We are all human. Pilgrimages aren’t everything. However well intentioned, we do not all reach the Holy Land.

Ah, this good Kingdom of Books! May all our children have the good fortune to inherit such a Kingdom.