Appalling Banality

 

I have never belonged to a book club. For that matter, no one has ever asked me to join one, and if they did, I'm sure I would decline, because I would not be likely to read the relevant books. 

I don't admit to this proudly, like someone who cherishes his "independent spirit." That's rubbish. I admire those who, like Hilary, forge through one book after another, whether or not she entirely enjoys it, taking notes and formulating opinions. And I enjoy hearing a little about the event later as well as various tidbits about what was served for dinner and what her friends, who are also my friends, have been up to lately.

To be honest, I also have difficulty reading the books that I myself chose for more than a chapter or two. Some other title often lures me away, or I feel that I GET the point, and the material to follow is mere window-dressing. There are so many other books vying for my attention.    

This may explain why I am not only thrilled, but also proud of myself, when I make it to the end of a book. like a teenager filling out a book card for English class at school.

When I see the annual "best books of the year" lists, I'm intrigued. But I sometimes wonder who has time to chase down and read even a few of the year's best books, when at this late date they haven't read any of last year's  "best books," not to mention Thucydides or Pushkin? (I haven't read either one.)  

Suddenly a scene comes back to me. High school, and my good friend Joe invites me to an intimate skating party. (His family lives on the lake. His dad's a professor. We play squash in his basement court. I give his little sister guitar lessons.) 

It's Carl, me, and Joe, I think. And there are some girls there. The snowball fight out on the ice-covered lake is over, we're drinking cocoa in the den. (I think Joe's parents may have organized this event; perhaps they're listening in upstairs). In the course of our tittering adolescent conversation I make mention of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground which my brother, a freshman in college, brought home from Duluth, and one of the girls says to me with perhaps a touch of disdain, "Oh, you've read everything."

Come again? How could that be possible? I'm only sixteen?

A half-century later, I'm painfully aware of how little I've read, but it no longer bothers me. I'm still exploring, and it's still great fun. If I ever had the desire to master the canon, that desire has long since been exposed as a childish chimera. It can't be done.

Just now I pulled the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley off the shelf. Why? Because it suddenly occurred to me that at the time of the winter skating party I'm describing, Mahfouz had recently won the Nobel Prize, and Joe's dad was reading him.

His thumbnail review: "So depressing!"

I find the first few pages engaging, but have soon turned my attention to Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jemenez's autobiography, Space and Time, which has been calling out to me from the shelf for decades, albeit very faintly. Opening it at random, I read: 

"Though the depths of creation are hidden and cannot be explained, one can see the connections, the broken ropes it trails, memories. These can have a appalling banality ... But without them one would not have lived."