I’ve been a passionate reader since childhood. Print is beautiful to me. My eyes automatically seize on any text in the vicinity, whether a DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE sign or the side panel of a box of Cheerios. Some grown-ups remember the times they swam in a cold pond or raced their bikes along a country road as children. I remember going out to the beach one morning with The Once and Future King and looking up to find that the sun was setting. I remember the time I read The Outsiders, a book about disaffected teenagers, from cover to cover while draped upside down over a kitchen chair. My body hurt like hell, but I would have had to stop reading to get up.
I can’t read with that level of absorption anymore. In fact, during much of the day there are things I can’t read at all. The newspaper, a book review, a lively magazine profile are all fine. But even when I have the luxury of complete solitude, I’m unable, before the hour of ten P.M., to read a novel or a reflective essay.
Only after the children have gone to bed, my husband and I have performed triage on our to-be-discussed list, and my schedule for the next day has been organized can I sink into language with a capital L. I get into bed, adjust my thin pillow against my fat pillow. I put on my socks (it’s no fun reading with cold feet). I open my book, and the following thought allows me to begin: No one needs me. Maybe no one even remembers who I am! It’s too late in the day for me to make any more mistakes, disappoint anyone, complete any uncompleted tasks. However I may have failed or fallen behind, I’m off the hook until sunrise. And time, which all day has pressed like a tight band against my consciousness, slackens. The clock finds a thirteenth hour.
Sometimes I do stalk my bookshelves in the middle of the afternoon during an unexpected windfall of free time, eyes scanning the unread novels, essay collections, ruminations on God and love and history—all the biggies. My heart beats rapidly; I grow excited with possibility. I’m in love with the many things that I have yet to feel and know. I’m experiencing the idea of reading, which is generally so stimulating that I discover I can’t begin at all.
But when the bedroom light is dimmed and the telecommunicatory hum of the universe has been smothered behind the closet door, I’m ready for the reality of reading, which is less exalted but ultimately more satisfying. I find it in myself to begin; I open to page one. A man is standing in a bakery on a hot summer afternoon. I see the shirt the man is wearing, note the fact that his tie is folded in his pocket. I see the baker’s wife at the cash register. Suddenly I’m sheltered by a thicket of detail. The sights and sounds and smells of the book pull me in and slow me down in a way that those of the real world, oddly, often do not. I’m no longer at the wishing-fearing-planning pace of my day. I’m not running but walking. And where I wind up, book after book, is an unmatched state of bliss.