Consumption

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Auguste Rodin - The Secret, 1910

I’m dissatisfied with how I’ve been spending much of my time. Many of my mistakes over the past several months have been related to over-focusing on the present and the immediate future and the expense of my long term happiness. The periods of greatest intellectual fertility for me have coincided with those that I have spent reading large quantities of books. When I am not reading, my internal life dulls, my writing becomes workmanlike and I lose the sense of my own capabilities.

Reading is like nutrition. If you read good books, the mind strengthens. Reading poor books or passing over literature in favor of less challenging forms of entertainment leads to cranial softening.

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to review every book that I read on this blog. I’m embarrassed and saddened to have read only four this year so far, even if I have been going through dislocations the entire time. I have so many that I would like to read, but I have not spent my time wisely.

If I had more money, I would spend more of it on books. I like owning them, as I prefer to mark as I read. In any case, most paperbacks that I take with me end up disheveled. I habitually ring up late charges on books from the library, as for some reason I hold onto them long after I’ve gone through them. I feel as if I don’t want to part with them.

Even so, that is not much of an excuse. There are plenty of free e-books online that I can go through. I can e-mail publishers and offer to review books for them in exchange for free copies. I can work more to be able to afford more books. I can purchase used copies instead of new ones.

It’s as much of a professional requirement as it is important for the cultivation of my intellect. I read so much mediocre text while I’m researching for work that it has a deleterious effect on me.

I have a round goal of five books a week. I could do seven. At the pace from the beginning of this year, I’m at an anemic less than one a week.

I wonder why this is?

I have a guess: I start feeling frightened when I fire on all cylinders, when I’m taking care of myself as well as I can. It often leads to increased feelings of happiness, which I then act self-destructively to suppress.

It feels safer to let my head go soft. Lest we forget, reading is what got me into this mess in the first place. If it had not been for my unusual literacy, I would be nothing more than an airhead rich boy. Eventually, being a giant in a land of mental midgets starts to breed intellectually lazy habits. I chiefly wanted to be able to impress the people around me to ward off attack. That never took much effort. Whenever I started to feel insecure about my level of knowledge, I would rush to update it, so I would have some new book to discuss.

I do spend about 70% of my waking hours reading. The rest of it is made up of writing, eating, cleaning, exercising and therapy. Just as with food and anything else, the quality of that reading is what matters, followed distantly by the quantity.

It has always bothered me that readers have always been so rare in my life, even among liberal arts majors in college.

Lest I complain too much, I recall one moment during which I overheard some English majors name-dropping authors in a cafeteria that I had not read, but felt that I should have, and I began to feel extraordinarily insecure. I had to wait until one of them mentioned Phillip K. Dick before I could chime in to show off that I, too, read books. I liked being the king off a very small mountain, and feared the moment that I would be exposed as less than I thought myself to be.

Which is, of course, a fear that belonged to my parents that I took ownership of. My parents read a great deal when they were young, but when they aged, they gave up the habit. My father would read, at most, a single book a year. My mother eventually devolved to paging through trash every now and again. I was the family reader. I would purchase a crushing load of books every couple months, run through them all, shelve them and then acquire replacements.

I believed that I had to feed the intellectual vanity of my parents on my own. I felt angry and afraid  that they were both such transparent intellectual frauds who would endlessly praise their own intelligence – yet not find the time to page through a single book over the course of a year. It demoralized me. I wanted to worship my parents. I wanted to find something – anything – that I could respect about them.

There was nothing.

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