"Comfort reading"

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.  – Elias Canetti ¹

I am not one for reading projects. I have never planned to read a play of Shakespeare every day until I have read them all or set out to read every novel by a particular author in order of their publication. There are people who every year read all six novels on the Booker Prize shortlist to make a judgement to compare to the jury's or ask "Where to start?" with an author when they (the author) has recently died or been awarded the Nobel Prize (which amounts to the same thing).²  I wonder what they hope to achieve.

Despite this, I did plan to read Harvard UP's four-volume Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin in order. And not just in book order but each essay in each book in order. I believed this would enable to me to get a handle on Walter Benjamin's thought better than knowing well the odd essay like The Image of Proust or The Storyteller, both found in a battered copy of Illuminations I've had since the late 1980s, and as a result become a more informed and learned person, able to reach for an idea or example with the nonchalance of one who knows. It started with great promise with consecutive essays on Trauerspiel moving me with unexpected force ³, only then to reach the 69-page essay On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. Not only was it like walking across the Atacama Desert, it was like eating it as well. Of course, I could skip the essay and carry on but, no, it had to be every essay and in order. This is also why I resent books with long introductions by a third party. While they may be full of useful information, with their spin and spoilers they diminish the enthusiasm one had to read the main text, yet skipping them feels like one cannot claim to have read the book.⁴

Unread books promise, cajole, weep and sneer. Beside the four volumes on the bookshelf is the translation of Benjamin's Arcades Project. Twenty-five years on it remains untouched. (Note the peekaboo on the dust jacket, a design perhaps inspired by Albert Angelo by BS Johnson.) And then on a coffee table there are the toppling piles of partly read books promising a glorious future of enlightenment: Joseph Leo Koerner's Reformation of the Image, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale and Georges Poulet's Metamorphosis of the Circle are just three.⁵  Instead I have been picking up books I have read and reading them for the second, third or even fourth time. Is this comfort reading?

How do we understand this phrase? Akin to comfort blanket, it suggests a retreat into warmth and familiarity. The number of adults reading or, rather, rereading the Harry Potter novels suggests as much, and more: reading as passivity; reading as sleep. If fantasy novels arouse wonder in a child, they numb an adult. I recognise this need even if I could never read that kind of book. There is a longing only to submerge oneself in a river of prose, to find a rhythm as one sentence follows another on the way perhaps to that fabled infinity, even if that is now diminished into the complete absorption of a complete work.

I have long been aware of the dangers of dilettantism, the tendency to be satisfied with a passing understanding of what one is dealing with, manifest in the haphazard nature of blogging. Recently, I saw an advert for Indie Scholars and, keen to find a way to read and write more productively, I downloaded its free practical guide. When I saw the advice to get rid of my TV, I found the answer...and got rid of the guide instead. It is for the unexpected and perhaps for the revelatory that I read and risk dilettantism as their possibility. I take comfort in desultory reading. The process of reading has something infinite about it.

Notes 

1. From The Secret Heart of the Clock. 

2. This urge is worth noting: it suggests respect for authority and the impulse to question that authority without questioning the conditions generating the need for authority. If they did, their reviews may become more interesting. 

3. As a result I began to read Origin of the German Trauerspiel but stalled at the seductively entitled Epistemo-Critical Foreword. 

4. That said, Hannah Arendt's 58-page introduction to Illuminations contains a quotation I have always valued: 'Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not "an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice."' 

If one wants to know where the quotation comes from, the publishers in their infinite wisdom have provided a reference to a page number in the German Gesammelte Schriften. Were they not aware that Illuminations is a translation for people who cannot read German?! Anyway, by coincidence it's from the Epistemo-Critical Foreword. 

5. Blanchot says Poulet's book prompted him to ask himself why "along with this book, the very history of criticism and culture closed".