Thursday, November 18, 2004
(7:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reading Moments
I have good reading memories. Sometimes I'd like to go back -- not because I didn't appreciate it at the time. I did. I just want it back, again. I want to go back to that day that I was reading The Book of Mormon in my empty house, after Richard had just moved out, with my two kittens cuddled up on a corner of the couch. I want to go back to the exquisite sadness of reading Hegel, accompanied by Debussy, on a cold winter night when I felt absolutely alone. I want to go back to the summer Saturday that I spent reading Love in the Time of Cholera, reading that the protagonist had remained a virgin for his long-deferred love and believing it. I want to go back to the night that I finished The Trial, during high school, in an empty house once again, listening to Chopin, not allowing myself to go downstairs because I was worried I would kill myself. I want to go back to that summer of reading the entire Old Testament, huge chunks at a time -- noticing the inconsistencies and laughing out loud, with pleasure and relief. There was also the weekend that I didn't go home during one of Olivet's breaks, but instead stayed in my room almost the entire time, reading White Noise.There was the time that I came down to campus a week early, knowing my apartment was ready, with no money, no purpose, sitting in the virtually unfurnished living room, in a lawn chair, reading Being and Time. I want the winter break back when I read Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Theology and Social Theory; I want to sit in a rigid armchair in a room in the house my parents bought after I went away to college, too cold, almost falling asleep, reading Ovid. I want every awkward moment of every conversation where I tried to explain what I was experiencing in reading -- I want to savor every single one of them individually, the sensation of having something truly incommunicable. I want to sit under a tree reading Robin Hood again (the extended version that the Davison Public Library had, with the interlude about Little John's solo adventures), as I did every summer for many years. I want to experience again what it's like to read Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison for the first time, what it's like to read Church Dogmatics while a bunch of middle school students are asking me to turn up the volume on the video, what it's like to read Proust -- or the joy of reading a book full of sheer information, reading what is basically a reference book, letting it all flow in.
I want to sit in the library at Olivet, early in the morning, take off my shoes, and read Lolita. I want to read Repetition again for the first time. I want to read the first hundred pages of Ulysses again and again and again, and I want Stephen to be every bit as boring, and I want everyone to walk by and chuckle at me reading this big fat book my every spare moment. I want to be sitting in chapel, reading the first chapters of Invisible Man, panic-stricken at the thought that such things had ever happened in real life. I want to be puzzled again at what "Heideggerian hope" could possibly mean.
I'm sure that when I get shot in the back of the head, after living a dissolute and useless life, the memories will flash in my mind of the people that I have loved, the moments of sheer joy I have experienced with those most precious to me -- but my mind will be filled just as much with words, with turns of phrase, with arguments and storylines, with archaic words and spellings, with the enjoyment that comes only from being killed by the letter.
