To instruct us in the value of reading, he wanted merely to recount for us a kind of beautiful Platonic myth, with the simplicity of the Greeks who have revealed to us almost all the true ideas and left to scrupulous modernity the task of thoroughly plumbing their depths.
But even if I think that reading, in its essence, this fruitful miracle of communication in the bosom of solitude, is something more, something other that what Ruskin says it is, I nevertheless do not think that we can grant it the preponderant role in our spiritual life which Ruskin seems to assign to it.
The limits to the role of reading derive from the nature of its virtues. And it is once again childhood reading that I will turn to in order to investigate what these virtues consist of.
The book you have seen me reading just now by the fireplace in the dining room, in my bedroom deep in the armchair with its crocheted head-rest, and during the beautiful afternoon hours under the hazelnut trees and the hawthorns of the park, where every breeze from the immeasurable fields came from so far away to play silently around me, offering up to my inattentive nostrils, without a word, the scent of the clover and sainfoin to which I would sometimes raise my tired eyes – since your eyes, straining toward that book at a distance of twenty years, may not be able to make out its title, my memory, whose vision is better suited to this type of perception, will tell you what it was: Captain Fracasse by Théophile Gautier.
Above all, I loved in it two or three sentences which seemed to me the most original and beautiful in the book. I could not imagine that any other author could ever have written anything comparable. But I had the feeling that their beauty corresponded to a reality that Gautier let us glimpse only a little corner of, once or twice per volume.
And since I thought that he surely must know it in its entirety, I wanted to read other books of his in which all the sentences would be as beautiful as these, and would be about things I wanted to know his opinions on. ‘Laughter is not at all cruel by nature; it distinguishes man from beast, and it is, as stands written in the Odyssey of the Grecian Poet Homerus, the privilege of the blessed, immortal deities who laugh Olympian peals to while away all the hours of eternity.’7
This sentence brought me to a state of true intoxication. I thought I could perceive a marvelous antiquity through those Middle Ages that only Gautier could reveal to me. But I would have preferred it if, instead of saying it surreptitiously, after a long, boring description of a castle with so many words I didn’t know the meaning of that I couldn’t imagine it at all, he had written a book of nothing but sentences like this, and had spoken of things that, after his book was finished, I could continue to know and love.
I would have preferred it if he, the one wise custodian of truth, had told me the correct opinion I should have of Shakespeare, of Saintine, of Sophocles, Euripides, Silvio Pellico whom I had read during an unusually cold March, pacing back and forth, stamping my feet, and running along the paths every time I shut the book in the exaltation of having just finished reading, of the energy stored up during my immobility, and of the bracing wind blowing down the village streets.
Above all, I would have wanted him to tell me if I had a better or worse chance of arriving at the truth if I repeated my sixth grade class, or if I became a diplomat when I grew up, or a lawyer at the appellate courts. But as soon as the beautiful sentence was finished, he started describing a table covered ‘with a layer of dust so thick that you could trace words in it with your finger’, something so insignificant in my eyes that I could not pay it the slightest attention; and I was reduced to wondering what other books Gautier had written that might better satisfy my longing and finally let me know the entirety of his thought.
Indeed, this is one of the great and wondrous characteristics of beautiful books (and one which enables us to understand the simultaneously essential and limited role that reading can play in our spiritual life): that for the author they may be called Conclusions, but for the reader, Provocations. We can feel that our wisdom begins where the author’s ends, and we want him to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires. He awakens these desires in us only when he gets us to contemplate the supreme beauty which he cannot reach except through the utmost efforts of his art.
But by a strange and, it must be said, providential law of spiritual optics (a law which signifies, perhaps, that we cannot receive the truth from anyone else, that we must create it ourselves), the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing. Moreover, when we ask it questions it cannot answer, we are also asking for answers that would not tell us anything, because one effect of the love which poets awaken in us is to make us attach a literal importance to the things which for them are meaningful due to merely personal emotions.
In every picture they paint for us, they seem to give us but a fleeting glimpse of a marvellous place unlike anywhere else in the world, and we want them to make us penetrate its heart. ‘Bring us with you,’ we wish we could say to Maeterlinck, to Madame de Noailles, into ‘the Dutch garden where flowers long out of fashion grow’, along the way perfumed ‘with clover and artemisia’, and to all the places on earth which you never told us about in your books but which you judge to be just as beautiful.
We want to go see the field which Millet shows us in his Spring (for painters instruct us the same way poets do), we want Claude Monet to lead us to Giverny, on the Seine, to the bend in the river that he barely lets us make out through the morning mist. Now in actual fact, it was purely the chance of friends or relations happening to invite them to pass through here or visit there that made Madame de Noailles, Maeterlinck, Millet, Claude Monet choose this road, this garden, this field, this bend in the river to depict rather than any other.
What makes these places seem different to us, and more beautiful than anywhere else in the world, is that they bear, on their surface, like an elusive reflection, the impression they made on a genius, a reflection we would have seen playing, strangely and tyrannically, upon the indifferent and submissive surface of any other terrain that he or she depicted. This semblance with which the places charm us and deceive us, beyond which we want so much to go, is the very essence of that which, lacking a third dimension so to speak – a mirage frozen on a canvas – constitutes a vision.
This mist that our eager eyes want to pierce: that is the last word of the painter’s art. And the supreme efforts of the writer, like those of the painter, culminate in raising, only part way, the veil of ugliness and meaninglessness which makes us incurious about the universe. Then he says to us: ‘Look, look,
‘Perfumed with clover and artemisia,
Clasping their lively, narrow streams: the
Land of the Aisne and of the Oise.
‘Look at the Dutch house in Zeeland, pink and shiny like a seashell. Look! Learn to see!’ And at that very moment, he disappears. Such is the value of reading and also what it lacks. To turn it into a discipline in its own right is to give too great a role to what is merely an initiation. Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.
There are nevertheless certain circumstances, pathological circumstances one might say, of spiritual depression, in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline entrusted with the task of continually leading a lazy spirit, by means of repeated excitations, back to an inner life.
Books then play for the person in these circumstances a role analogous to that played by psychotherapists for certain neurasthenics. It is well known that in certain diseases of the nervous system, even if none of the organs themselves are affected, the sufferer is swallowed up in a kind of inability to will, as if trapped in a kind of deep rut and unable to pull himself out of it alone, where he would eventually waste away entirely if a strong helping hand were not held out to him. His brain, his legs, his stomach, his lungs are unharmed.
He has no real incapacity that prevents him from working, walking, eating, being out in the cold, but he finds it impossible to will the various acts he is otherwise perfectly able to perform, and this inertia of the will would inevitably lead to an organic decay that ended up becoming the equivalent of the sickness he did not have
