On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice. Instead of looking for signs, I form an impression of a tone, and if I can hear in that tone the harmonies of the human improvisation extended through 5,000 years of space and time, then I read the book. By this device I am absolved from reading most of what is published in a given year. I have found that few writers learn to speak in the human voice, that most of them make use of alien codes (academic, political, literary, bureaucratic, technical) in which they send messages already deteriorating into the half-life of yesterday’s news. Their transmissions seem to me incomprehensible, and unless I must decipher them for professional reasons, I am content to let them pass by. Too many subtle voices divert my attention, to the point that when I enter a bookstore I am besieged by the same sense of imminent discovery that follows me through seaports and capital cities. This restlessness never troubles me in libraries, probably because libraries are to me like museums. It is the guile of commerce that accounts for the foreboding in bookstores; I have a feeling of the marketplace, of ideas still current after 2,000 years, of old men earning passage money by telling tales of what once was the city of Antioch.
The murmurings of these voices often reduce me to a state of hesitation in which I cannot choose between opposite directions. Nor is it any easier on those days when I have the capacity for decision. I feel the sudden compulsion to buy as many books as I can carry, everything from the complete works of Trollope to German translations of The Golden Bough. As I have grown older the impulse toward recklessness, has become stronger rather than weaker, with the result that I have been obliged to impose minor disciplines. I haven’t the strength of character to buy only one book on a single afternoon, and so I permit myself two (counting works of two or three volumes as one book) as a defense against profligacy. I no longer buy clothbound books unless forced into it, and even among paperbacks I make distinctions. I try to avoid the shoddier imprints and will search for several months if I know that a title has been published by Anchor, New Directions, or the Penguin Classics. The pleasure that I take in the Penguin volumes has a quality of sensual obsession that other men confine to porcelain or polished woods. It is a pleasure that derives from the weight of the paper and the way the pages fall under the hand, from the typefaces (particularly Monotype Garamond and Monotype Bembo) and from a clarity of design that seems to achieve a precise balance between substance and grace. It also has to do with the grandeur of a publishing conception that attempts an entire history of man’s wandering inland from the Jurassic sea. I can think of no other publishing house that offers not only the more familiar roster of authors from Homer through Joyce but also the works of Exquemelin, Zarate, Basho, Pausanias, and Notker The Stammerer. As a result of my addiction to the Penguin Classics I have rearranged my library for what I hope to be the last time. Whereas in earlier periods I divided it into conventional parts (fiction and nonfiction, alphabetically by author, by nationalities; by literary genre, alphabetically by subject), I now have arranged it in a chronology that follows the sequence of an author’s date of birth. This gives me a sense of the distance traveled and allows me to remember that John Bunyan was born in the same decade as Molière and that Livy, despite his belief in the old pieties, belonged to a generation later than that of Catullus.
My habits of reading are as random as my buying of books. I cannot read without a pencil in my hand, and in books that have liked I discover marginalia ten and twenty years out of date, much of it revised at intervals of two and three years to accord with the shifting images of myself. In an edition of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education I find a scribbled note in what I take to be my handwriting at the age of nineteen, a note subsequently crossed out and contradicted by the remark “Foolishly romantic.” Usually I read three or four books at the same time, preferably by authors of different centuries. It sometimes happens that I find myself reading of different periods in the history of the same landscape (Herodotus and T.E. Lawrence on the rivers of Mesopotamia; George Orwell and Samuel Johnson on the treachery of London); when this effect is compounded by the superimposition of marginalia reaching across twenty years in cities as unlike one another as Chicago and Rangoon, I begin to understand the analogy between music and what the modern physicists have in mind when they try to describe the continuum of space and time.
As a student, and later as an observer of the avant garde, I felt obliged to finish every book that I undertook to begin. This I no longer do. If within the first few pages of the text I cannot hear the harmonic tonality in the author’s voice—no matter if he promises to introduce me to the court of Cyrus or the inner councils of the Democratic party—I abandon him at the first opportunity. I do this even with authors of great reputation, preferring to blame myself for whatever fault can be assigned and so to pass on to an author in whose company I can feel the warmth of recognition. After some years I return to the author of great reputation in the hope that I have learned enough to appreciate his greatness. When I was twenty I couldn’t read Aldous Huxley; by the time I was thirty I no longer could read Herman Hesse or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I don’t count myself a literary critic, which relieves me of the necessity to make judgments or form consistent opinions. I can contradict myself without apology or embarrassment, and within a period of months I can declare a former enthusiasm inoperative. I look for writers with whom I can imagine myself holding a conversation, who have seen enough of the world to remark on its wonders and vanities without bemoaning the loss of their youthful illusions. It is for this reason that I prefer the ancient writers, or those among the moderns (modern being defined as no later than 1924) who have survived the winnowing of time and the misfortune of inept translation. I seek an understanding of the character of man, and so I don’t much care whether the author chooses Paris of the 1845 or present-day Washington for his mise-en-scène.
My preference for the ancients often involves me in arguments with two kinds of critics: those who nominate writers to hierarchies and classifications and those who insist upon the miraculousness of the new. As a defense against the second, more numerous, faction, I have adopted the strategy of waiting at least three years before reading any book that receives unanimous acclaim or purports to tell an inside story. On first hearing, the truth usually strikes most people as outrageous, indecent, and wrong, and so when I come across a book about which nobody can find anything unpleasant to say; I assume that it contains a comfortable sermon. I doubt the reliability of all inside stories, and the interval of three years allows sufficient time for the politician to lose an election or for the question of the moment to exhaust the engines of publicity.
The delay also grants me sufficient time to modify my own ignorance. Among the ancient authors the fogs of superstition take the form of religious or magical beliefs through which, living at a later period in the history of science, I can sometimes see. Among the moderns the equivalent superstitions take the form of social or political prejudice to which I also fall victim. With a few contemporary writers (Richard Hughes, Evan S. Connell, Jr., Loren Eiseley, W. H. Auden) I know myself to be in the company of men less easily deceived than I, but in most of what passes for modern literature I find the same ideological rant that crowds the journals of informed opinion. Perhaps this is the fault of the age. Writers retreat into dogma or journalism when they feel they cannot locate a coherent image of man in what they see as the rubble of his society, Thus their despair, their choice of narrow argument, and their flight into the little rooms of sexual fantasy. The ancient authors, at least those among them who remain in print, do not keep themselves in cages. They approach the study of man as if he were a universe unto himself, so vast and so mysterious as to defy the promulgation of doctrine and the making of smaller mystifications to conceal the fear of an empty stage.
Having learned to admire the spaciousness of Voltaire and Montaigne, I have come to think that the most astonishing books are those that I can begin at any point in the narrative. The books that must always be read in sequence I think of as mediocre, the tricks of a magician at a child’s birthday party as compared to the musical navigations of the blue whale. No matter where I take up the essays of Montaigne, whether in the midst of a discussion of cannibals or of presumption, I do not feel that I have missed the first act. I notice the same effect with novels that I read more than once; I do not need to go back to the beginning to remember the baldness of Vautrin or the ardent expectations of Dorothea Brooke.
From an author whom I admire I will listen to anything and everything—to reports of marvels and portents at Tarentum, to accounts of emperors gone sick with cruelty or of giant ants standing watch over treasuries of Indian gold, to explanations of the revolution of 1848 or polemics against the Jesuits; to chronicles of love requited and love betrayed, even to the music criticism of Rameau’s nephew. It is all the same story, all proof of the same mind, which, if I am to believe the evidence of the evolutionary record, is also my own. Cicero seems no less real to me than Winston Churchill or Richard Nixon. They inhabit the same continuum, in which everything takes place in the same instant, and in which they depend for their reality on an act of my imagination.
Despite the recent events in Washington, I expect that Cicero has had more to do with the shaping of my life than Richard Nixon, As a boy I read his philippics against Antony and Verres (acquiring an impression of politics and the state); I will continue to read his correspondence long after Mr. Nixon has faded from living memory (revising my impression of politics in the light of later commentaries, not so much on Nixon as on Caesar). This is not merely a literary conceit. Cicero’s execution coincided with the failure of the Roman Republic, which in turn gave rise to the ruin of the Empire, which gave way to the barbarians and the priests, who in turn provoked the mockery of Voltaire, who borrowed from Cicero, and from whom Jefferson acquired the ideas that informed the writing of the Constitution. And so forth through infinite computations. If I knew enough about what I was doing, I could begin anywhere, working the thread backward and forward through the loom of time, weaving the design of a single and continuous narrative, always and everywhere present. If I possessed the imagination of a poet or the knowledge of a biologist, I could discern aspects of the design not only within every civilization that man has had the temerity to raise up from the mud but also within the life and present metamorphosis of every individual. I am told that in the space of nine months the human embryo ascends through a sequence analogous to 50 million years of evolution, that within the first six years of life the human mind dreams of its travels through another 5,000 years of the historical journey from Sumer. Occasionally I am reminded of these distances when I pass a man on the street or when I happen to notice an expression in the eyes of a woman in a foreign town. The force of the recognition strikes me more poignantly when traveling in another country. At home, among friends and familiar dissonance, the sound of the human voice often eludes me. Muffled by politics or social convention, it hides itself in the language of whatever profession offers the most impenetrable code.
But in the pages of a book it sometimes declares itself in a tone as unmistakable as that of woodwinds. No wonder I am seized with dreadful expectation when wandering among the shelves of a bookstore. It is as if I were presented with the possibility of a thousand melodic lines, each of them subject to as many variations, all of them forming a counterpoint with a thousand other melodic lines to compose a harmony that I will never know. With the writers in whom I can hear fragments of the music, I gain an impression of its size.
