I used to read a lot.
Indeed, I became an English major, way back in the Upper Paleolithic Period, precisely because I loved to read—and had, for as long as I can remember. When parents were sending kids to their rooms for minor infractions, my parents sent me outside to play. As long as I had books, my room was no punishment at all.
I recall summers in elementary and middle school (we called it “junior high” in those benighted days), sprawled out on the couch, book on my chest, for so long that I’d get a head rush when I finally stood up. I read every Hardy Boys adventure, every Agatha Christie mystery. Narnia. Middle Earth. So many other books that I don’t even remember—the only ones that stand out in memory are the ones that I felt I needed to hide: The Godfather, The Exorcist.
When I left school to “pursue” music, I continued to read voraciously. Many of my friends, and most notably a girlfriend at the time, had joined the English program at the local CSU. I’d get reading lists from them and join them in their book clubs. Roth. Erdrich. Pynchon, McCarthy, Delillo. Morrison. Potok. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake.
I stumbled into existentialism—No Exit, “L’Hôte”—which led me inexorably to Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground,” and then onto the other Russians: Bulgakov, Gogol, Mandelstam, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Pushkin, Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin (and especially Nabokov’s introduction, disdainful of all other translations…).
I fell in love with postmodern lit, especially the influential, if now thoroughly conventional, techniques of metafiction: Barnes, Barth, Barthelme.
I made it to UC Irvine, via Long Beach City College, and the list of authors and their books gets so long I wouldn’t even know where to start in listing them. One advantage of UCI’s quarter system was that the professors assigned the same amount of reading each quarter as the LBCC profs assigned each semester. In effect, I was assigned a year and a half’s worth of reading each year.
And in the background of all that, I kept reading things on my own: I read books by authors new to me, and I read familiar books in new ways. I read “high lit,” biography, mystery, pulp, science fiction, self-help, humor, thrillers, horror. I dabbled in ethnography, philosophy, history (both the grand sweep and the micro). The list goes on.
Then I got a job at the community college.
Teaching at a community college—especially where I teach, in a economically disadvantaged area—is great. The students are hungry (I meant that metaphorically, but, sadly, it’s often true literally, as well) to build better lives. And I believe I’ve made a difference: I’ve had a surprising number of students tell me how one of my classes changed their lives for the better. It’s good work, and—especially when it seems that the world is on fire—it feels good to do good work.
But the job is not optimized for reading.
English at the community college focuses primarily on composition courses, which involves reading a lot of student work—often opaque, tortured, and convoluted work as students learn what it means to write rigorous, thoughtful, and clear academic essays. That kind of reading is both time- and energy-consuming.
I’m not complaining, by the way. I’m not saying, “Poor me! I don’t get to read.” I’m just pointing out that, in order to read, I have to carve out the time and mental space for it. And the job doesn’t make that easy.
To an extent, I am able to carve out some time and mental space. My commute is a good 40 minutes each way, so I have lots of time for audiobooks (I am not one who argues that listening is not reading). But I can only manage lighter fare—reasonably straightforward narratives, or the occasional Great Course—while I’m driving. It’s too easy to lose track of what’s going on when distracted by something happening on the road.
I’ve also snuck in a half hour of reading each night before I go to bed. It’s not always possible, but I’ve been fairly consistent with it. And while it’s better than nothing, it’s not enough time to immerse myself in a text.
Aside from that, all my other reading is in short bursts, slipped into life’s interstices, and consisting mostly of shorter articles: bite sized presentations about the news, or about journalism, or about teaching.
When I started Montaigne’s Essays (which I talked about in an earlier post), I hadn’t realized how much I’d lost the skill of deep, sustained reading. Many a time I would look back on several pages and realize that I didn’t remember anything from them—and then, when I reread the passage, it was like reading it for the first time. A complete blank.
In some passages, this might be expected. I am not an expert in 16th-century French history or celebrity, so there were times when I simply did not have any idea what he was writing about (even with fairly generous footnotes). One of his essays analyzed and judged the styles of a number of writers, both contemporary and ancient; I had not even heard of the majority of these writers. But even when I had, I could recall only faint echoes of their work.
That said, there were plenty of other essays that should have been much less of a struggle. The last essay in this edition is “On Experience”—quintessential Montaigne in its focus on himself as an object of genuine and meaningful knowledge, on his attitude toward death, on the value of experience over book learning (prefiguring the Romantics). But reducing the 60-odd page essay to basically a single line in my word processor seems a bit thin. And I’d be hard pressed to expand my explanation much further.
I can follow, and dissect, clear arguments. I can follow plots, even intricate ones, as long as they move in a fairly connected way. But, though I enjoyed Essays, I struggled to follow them—and for all reasons that I love them: their contradictory and meandering exploration of his life, learning, and experience.
My reading abilities have withered, it seems. How do you get that back?