If you\u2019re reading this you are probably an addict reader.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re an addict reader and you\u2019ve lived long enough you must have started to wonder what reading has to do with remembering.<\/p>\n
The best books are those you remember enough to want to re-read and then they seem like nothing you\u2019ve ever read before. And after all a book \u2013 and more so a library \u2013 is itself an embodiment of memory which makes personal remembering redundant. So long as you can remember exactly which place \u2013 then lo! the words are there, they never went away. That\u2019s why Socrates didn\u2019t like writing. Lucky for him he never saw the internet, the last straw for anamnesis.<\/p>\n
Re-reading certain books such as A la Recherche <\/em>returns you to a place so familiar you feel you can only have dreamt it but that\u2019s probably not why you can\u2019t remember much of what was said there. Some of John Cowper Powys\u2019s novels have a similar effect although it\u2019s not so much a place as an aberrant discomfort. I\u2019m assuming you\u2019re not a Proust or Powys scholar, returning many times to reconsider every detail. The rest of us only read these books two or three times, probably many years apart. Writers hope it might be otherwise but writers\u2019 hopes aren\u2019t a reader\u2019s business.<\/p>\n \u2018Escapist reading.\u2019 \u2018Escaping into books.\u2019 You see how readers take the blame. It\u2019s not as if there isn\u2019t a question whether what they\u2019re escaping isn\u2019t worth escaping from.<\/p>\n Mostly all you need to remember when reading is some of what you\u2019ve been told in the preceding pages of that particular book. I hear your objection and grant you remember more than this but what I said was \u2018need\u2019. You\u2019re right there are territories beyond, some so remote that perhaps only incurables accidentally land there.<\/p>\n To find one of your own bookmarks still tucked into a book years later, or a previous owner\u2019s, a marker of \u2013 boredom? despair? maybe only a casual but prolonged interruption? If, if it\u2019s yours, you can remember that, and no more than that \u2026 perhaps it was a well-loved passage, once.<\/p>\n With many a book I remember where and when I read it, which usually has nothing to do with where I placed it in my imagination. (Often a place I\u2019ve otherwise forgotten and can\u2019t easily identify.) (Imagination, so distinct from remembering, yet they do merge at a point roughly 180\u00b0 behind the reading eye.)<\/p>\n People talk about \u2018extreme sports\u2019 as if reading isn\u2019t one of them. Remembering\u2019s strictly another. The difficulty is that in addressing the familiar you state the obvious.<\/p>\n All I remember about first reading Gertrude Stein is sitting in the Lyons restaurant on Streatham High Street and the yobs across the table joking about the 17-year-old studious me in fact studying nothing, just wonderfully dumbstruck. On the other hand I can\u2019t remember the place where I first read the short short story which hooked me on reading, that one of Hemingway\u2019s beginning \u2018We were in a garden at Mons.\u2019 I\u2019ve never been to Mons but I remember that garden as distinctly as the edition in which I found it, a mid-60s Penguin Modern Classic with a half-tone drawing of Mt Kilimanjaro on the cover. And the German soldier climbing over the wall. \u2018We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him.\u2019 It\u2019s so often one word in a certain usage that you don\u2019t forget.<\/p>\n Hemingway reinforced the notion that some writing is \u2018bookish\u2019, that it\u2019s \u2018only\u2019 written \u2018out of\u2019 reading rather than \u2018experience\u2019, as if reading were not itself an experience. Which would be terrible if true. Isn\u2019t An Anatomy of Melancholy<\/em> the most bookish and<\/em> the most \u2018experienced\u2019 of books?<\/p>\n \u2018What you write today you can only read tomorrow.\u2019 But writing and remembering, that\u2019s another question. \u2018I wrote this without knowing I was \u2013\u2019 \u2013 repeating without remembering? Watch out for both but don\u2019t confuse them, at least too often.<\/p>\n Reading and remembering both create tangents, sometimes similar, sometimes not. The tangents mesh but not, I think, with each other. They lie on different planes. Sometimes words, as if peculiarly charged, cross from one to the other, offering themselves up as new writing-stuff.<\/p>\n \u2018He\u2019s a walking library.\u2019 I do usually remember where to find this or that book and the passage I want but that doesn\u2019t mean I have all the contents in my head like the character in Auto da F\u00e9<\/em> who thought he\u2019d cracked \u2018the book racket\u2019, which I for one never have.<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t a walking library alive you can read like a book unless you skip a few pages.<\/p>\n A memory without faults wouldn\u2019t be worth the name. Nor is, now so common, an inaccurate index.<\/p>\n Phrases, sentences \u2018remembered\u2019 \u2013 more often in poetry than prose but usually ones my memory\u2019s rewritten for better or worse. Is it mostly, if not only, reader-writers who do this?<\/p>\n But, again, I\u2019m mainly thinking about everyday non-specialist reading, and what mind and eye are up to while we read a hundred pages of prose at one sitting. How we meet it, where it goes. The defining compression which poetry brings to language demands a different species of reading, perhaps a different area of memory, even different eye movements. An ability to sweep forward and back while attending to the written word-order \u2013 you can only properly read it when it\u2019s in some degree already memorised, at least as a structure with its internal connections set to work. And then sounded and in that sense akin to the yet more specialised reading of music. Or of mathematical equations \u2013 are there mathematicians who sing them out loud while they read? Has anyone tried Whitehead and Russell as text for performance?<\/p>\n How much reading is parallel thinking only distantly related to the words on the page? Fine by me if that\u2019s how and why you read but the best writing won\u2019t let you.<\/p>\n It\u2019s quite possible to read Finnegans Wake<\/em> at average speed. I did it at the sixth attempt. It was a different book from the one I\u2019d previously read slowly or aloud \u2013 as I remember.<\/p>\n Some perfectly good books it won\u2019t do to re-read. You may have forgotten nearly everything about them but you can\u2019t read them now as if for the first time and that\u2019s what you want. Are some of these the same ones you feel lost and lonely when you finish reading?<\/p>\n There are books you read and like well enough to keep for a while but then you send them back where they came from. Shelf-space doesn\u2019t always decide it. Maybe you think that whatever you remember about them suffices. But what a difference there is between readers and collectors, even if they\u2019re sometimes one and the same person. Perhaps the passion for first editions is a yearning for unblemished memory.<\/p>\n \u2018The words are still there, they never went away\u2019 \u2013 but you, you\u2019ve been up to other things in the meantime and for all you know they have too.<\/p>\n What about Borges\u2019 perhaps ironical remark that reading is \u2018more resigned, more civil, more intellectual\u2019 than writing? (Andrew Hurley\u2019s translation.) The \u2018more resigned\u2019 teases. I understand the \u2018more intellectual\u2019 although I wouldn\u2019t rely on it. I\u2019m cautious too about the \u2018more civil\u2019, endearing as it seems. Borges who often enough warns against Platonism often also succumbs to its allure. But when writing I\u2019m similarly tempted to think of \u2018the reader\u2019 as someone who may not be Funes the Memorious but has a better memory than mine. (There, you see, that\u2019s exactly what I\u2019ve just done.)<\/p>\n Reading as a search for coherence \u2013 but coherence asserts itself, crossing categories, it shows up in books found apparently at random in Oxfam or the last-day sale of any shop pincered out of business by Oxfam and Amazon. Sometimes I think those traces \u2013 perhaps mere tokens \u2013 have \u00a0been put there to test me but I don\u2019t like to ask by whom. I never otherwise suspect there may be a God or that He has such a sense of humour.<\/p>\n Alan Halsey\u2019s recent books are Even if only out of <\/em>(Veer) & In White Writing <\/em>(Xexoxial). He has recently finished editing the second volume of Bill Griffiths\u2019 collected poems for publication by Reality Street in 2014. He co-directs the antichoir Juxtavoices with Martin Archer.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re reading this you are probably an addict reader. If you\u2019re an addict reader and you\u2019ve lived long enough you must have started to wonder what reading has to do with remembering. The best books are those you remember enough to want to re-read and then they seem like nothing you\u2019ve ever read before. 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