21 February 2007

Reading something for the first time increasingly seems to me a primer: rather, like a casual meeting and introduction more than an opportunity to sit down and really get to know someone. Reading something for the first time, the best we can really hope for is a face and a name, maybe a bare kind of history, but never the sort of intimate knowledge that grows from friendship. And often, after introductions, even that name and bare history slips from our minds and we are left with only a distant familiarity—‘haven’t I met her before?’—and perhaps some longing to meet again. To strive for complete understanding and recollection after a first reading is rushing things, like asking for the love history of an acquaintance. It may even be destructive, if so intense an emphasis on specific memory brings us to reduce a work to its outline and page numbers and neglect its basic character and spirit. Do we not know a person more honestly by the way she introduces herself, in her eyes and handshake and manner of speech, than by her date of birth and hometown? These latter come to be meaningful in friendship, but as first facts they are cold and empty.

I used to think I knew a book once I had read it, so scholarship was a race to read everything once. But even the most intriguing of acquaintances fade if you never get further than a first meeting.

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Tags: Method