The fifth of the English Teacher's thoughts on Proust (December 14, 2006)
In his chapter "Reading" in Walden, Thoreau writes:
For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Thoreau does not suggest that reading is an exercise in reading oneself, as Proust does. Rather, Thoreau describes the "whole life" we must bring to reading if we are to read well and what kinds of works are worthy of that life. Earlier in this chapter, Thoreau recalls how he'd kept Homer's Illiad on his table, but because he'd been so busy building his house and hoeing his beans, he merely "looked at his page only now and then." In place of this "classic," he took up the kind of light reading we're all too familiar with:
I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
Is this a not-so-subtle way of saying that bad reading drives out good? Or is he saying that when we can't devote our whole lives to reading, because we're busy hoeing our beans, the only reading left to us is the kind that makes us ashamed? Where, indeed, does a "true" reader live if not in "true" books?
The intention of living in books, as Thoreau suggests, must be "steady"—that is, when he speaks of the "whole life," he means not only our whole being drawing on all of its accumulated experience, but our whole being devoted to a lifelong pursuit. A true reader is not merely an athlete in the prime of her life, but an athlete always. The shame for Thoreau is to have forgotten, for a stretch, how to live within the whole of himself, and the question of where he is living and in what pursuit is a theme Thoreau returns to repeatedly in Walden.
I don't know whether Thoreau read Montaigne, but his teacher—if I may call him that—Emerson did. In his essay "Of Books," Montaigne says that "I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself." At the end of his own book, in "Of Experience"— that great precursor to Emerson's essay—Montaigne illuminates his passage on reading when he says, "It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully." Montaigne, whose every page testifies to his devotion to books, understands the pleasure of reading as the pleasure of being, an end inseparable from his greatest of all projects, the assay of his self in writing.
While Thoreau can instruct us on what to bring to our reading and Montaigne on what to derive from it, we are left, in the solitude of our selves, to our own experience. Some months or years ago—what does it matter in book-time?—I told a few of my friends that from now on, I would read only books I'd already read. By my spurious calculations, I'd reached that late point in life that if I didn't cease trying to fill out my literary education, I'd run out of time for rereading the books that, over the last thirty-odd years, have given me the most pleasure. I'm not exactly sure what books I had in mind when I was saying this. I note that I still haven't cracked my old copy of Paradise Lost after nearly three decades. Perhaps I had in mind Proust, for whom such portentous declarations are hardly necessary.
If we consider writing as an assay of memory and experience, then Proust's closest descendent might be Wordsworth. However, I like to think of his more ancient countryman as Montaigne, whose work, for me, shares one important characteristic with Proust's: I can pick it up any time and read any passage, and still find the thread. I can't argue against Thoreau's ironic shame—how does one argue against his peculiar irony?—at having read travel books instead of Homer. However, as someone who's been hoeing his share of beans in graduate school, I could have recommended to him Montaigne, whose essays he might have borrowed from Emerson when he was over at his house, enjoying Mrs. Emerson's cooking. Or, had he lived long enough, he could have read Proust, though I somehow have a hard time imagining Thoreau feeling anything for Marcel's pursuits. Nature was Thoreau's mistress, and he loved her as all writers should love their subjects: with obsessiveness.
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