A Reader on Reading

These vital forces compete with and complement each other. To move away from the place we call ours allows us a better sense of our true identity but at the same time distracts us from self-reflection; to sit at a steadfast point helps us unveil that identity in communion with the numinous but also renders the task impossible by blinding us to what defines us in the surrounding, tangible world. We must move to meet those others who provide the shifting mirrors by means of which we piece together our self-portrait. And yet there must be a steadfast place in which we can stand and, by seeing what Yeats called “the face I had before the world was made,” pronounce the word I.

As a child, I made no clear distinction between my own identity and that which books created for me. What I mean is that I didn’t consciously differentiate between the roles books invented for me (Sinbad or Crusoe) and those which became mine through family circumstances and genetic makeup. I was that first-person singular whom I read and dreamt about, and the world overflowed from the page into conventional reality and back again. Space was that which Sinbad’s magic carpet forded, and time the long years Crusoe spent waiting to be rescued. Later, when the differences between everyday life and nighttime stories crept up on me, I realized that in a certain measure I had been given, thanks to my books, the words that helped make the one meaningful and the other intelligible, and offered a degree of consolation for both.

It may be that, of all the instruments we have invented to help us along the path of self-discovery, books are the most useful, the most practical, the most concrete. By lending words to our bewildering experience, books become compasses that embody the four cardinal points: mobility and stability, self-reflection and the gift of looking outward. The old metaphor that sees the world as a book we read and in which we too are read merely recognizes this guiding, all-encompassing quality. In a book, no one point is exclusively the north, since whichever is chosen, the other three remain actively present. Even after Ulysses has returned home to sit by his quiet hearth, Ithaca remains a port of call on the shores of the beckoning sea, one among the countless volumes of the universal library; Dante, reaching the supreme vision of love holding bound “into one volume all the leaves whose flight / Is scattered through the universe around” (legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna), feels his will and his desire turned by that love “that moves the sun and the other stars” (ma già volgeva il mio disio e l’velie

, / sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle). Likewise the reader who in the end finds the page written for him, a part of the vast, monstrous volume made up by all the libraries and lending sense to the universe.

And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong. In the most popular of the fictionalized versions, Eugène Sue’s nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton, Le Juif errant, the underlying theme is the wicked Jesuit plot to govern the world; the intellectual undertakings of the timeless Wanderer himself are not explored. On Ahasuerus’s ongoing journey (according to Sue) libraries are merely gathering rooms in aristocratic houses, and books either pious tracts or evil catalogues of sin under the guise of Jesuitical confession manuals.

But it is hard to believe that a merciful God would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting room without reading material. Instead, I imagine Ahasuerus granted two thousand years of itinerant reading; I imagine him visiting the world’s great libraries and bookstores, exhausting and replenishing his book bag with whatever new titles appear during his travels, from Marco Polo’s Il milione to Cervantes’s Don Quixote

, from Xueqin Cao’s Dream of Red Mansions to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, in which (like all readers) he will find traces of his own curious destiny. Closer to our time, so as not be overladen, the Wanderer travels perhaps with an e-book, which he periodically recharges at an Internet café. And in his reader’s mind, the pages, printed and virtual, overlay and blend and create new stories from a colossal mass of remembered and half-remembered readings, multiplying his books by a thousand, again and again.