A Meditation on Huge Books
A huge book suggests within its very form that it will never end, a prospect both terrifying and enticing to a certain kind of reader. I have long dreamed a book that will never end, that will divert me ceaselessly and contain a hundred thousand episodes and experiences I can identify in my own life, but trapped in the pleasingly distorting amber of fiction. With a truly good book, life makes more sense, insights are gleaned, the heart and mind are expanded; I want that feeling, forever. And yet, the largest books penned can still be consumed within the confines of a lifetime; in other words, the average life is still vaster than the most vast books; your life is larger than David Copperfield, War and Peace, Middlemarch and the Mahabharata.
This is a curious inversion of all my expectations. Why does War and Peace seem to contain all wisdom, why does it dwarf reality itself? Why am I freighted with that expectation? That does that say about my relationship with the practice of reading?
We come to a book seeking understanding. St. Augustine, right before the moment of his conversion, hears the voice of a child playing nearby: “pick up the book and read.” I too have yielded to this command, sometimes for the Bible, but many times for many other works, some of which are decidedly less sacrosanct.
Pick up the book and read; feel the size of it, imagine the thousands of hours that were involved in its creation, the hundreds or thousands of books that went into its writing, this intimidating mound of thoughts and experiences that can nonetheless, to my continual chagrin, be overcome with diligence and time, like mountains hewn into valleys by water.
Despite my hopes, I will defeat this book, I will come to its end, the spell will be broken, and every suggestion that it will envelop me totally is a lie. Instead, it is I who envelop the book, who upends its voluminous contents into myself, into my life.
And so, the reader who believes that he or she is lost in a book is deceived; the book is lost in them.