The decline of reading?
by abbamoses
I can’t believe I read this thing.
Beginning in my late teens, I read voraciously, and a big part of my self-image was Me, the Lover of Literature. There was a time when I read things like Finnegans Wake and Remembrance of Things Past for pleasure. A meaningful, high-quality life was one devoted to reading great literature — which, for the most part, meant reading great novels.
In the past few years I’ve been noticing that I find it much harder to get involved in, concentrate on, or even finish many of the books I start reading. Most recently I more or less forced myself through Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, then gave up outright on a collection of Chekhov’s stories. What had happened to the Lover of Literature? Was this some kind of selective senility? The much-publicized evil effect of the internet on my ability to focus?
Recently I’ve been eagerly reading Two Years before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana’s fascinating account of his short career as a seaman on an American merchant vessel in the 1830s. (He’d been a Harvard student until a case of measles so damaged his eyesight that he couldn’t study, so he went to sea in hopes that fresh air and exercise would restore his health. He got more fresh air and exercise than he’d anticipated, but his plan worked: he finished school and, fortunately, wrote this book.)
While savoring Dana I came to a realization: my problem isn’t reading, it’s fiction. I just don’t enjoy fiction nearly as much as I once did. Histories, biographies, autobiographies, lives of Saints, books of poetry, can all easily draw me in — one of my most-enjoyed books of the last year was a long biography of Johannes Brahms.
I can’t believe I read this thing.
I can’t account for this change, but I suspect that part of it is the fact that I no longer see Me, the Lover of Literature as an essential part of who or what I am. How many of our activities in this life are ways (at least in part) of maintaining a certain picture we have of ourselves?
Time to recalibrate the self-image.
If you ever test the waters of fiction once again, I recommend “The Last Station.” It’s about the last year of Tolstoy’s life, a sad man who for many was a messiah figure but was himself not the the “Tolstoyan” others imagined him to be and whom they sought to imitate. In my view this kind of fiction does where biographies cannot reach (though there are excellent Tolstoy biographies. I would put the one by Henri Troyat at the top of the list.)
I agree that the problem is fiction. For me it seems I have less tolerance for the physical feats of staying up late, losing sleep, sitting for long periods, not to mention the devouring of my ever more precious time. The lazy summer afternoons consumed reading fiction in my youth are just not open anymore. What time I spend reading is on things that I somehow believe will benefit more than imagination. Actually reading now is just as enjoyable to me, but the materials I choose speak to needs more relevant to the human whose age forces her to confront things like mortality and eternity.