Reading
The humble, workaday verb read conceals a remarkable etymological secret, a secret that is both highly unexpected and rich in Borgesian philosophical implications. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the word comes down to us (though not before having donned and doffed a few Dutch and Old English disguises) from the German word raten meaning, "to advise or guess." Continues our anonymous lexicographer, with what is intended to be an inconspicuous aside, "early senses included 'to interpret a riddle or a dream'; see rede."
But the more I think about it, the less incongruous it seems to me that read should mean, "to interpret a dream," for no other waking experience is as analogous to dreaming as reading. In fact, at times I momentarily confuse the two, mistaking something I have read for a dream, and visa versa. I would now like to make a second observation, suggested by the first, but of greater philosophical significance: There are times when it is difficult to say whether something really happened to us or whether we just read it in a book or saw it in a dream. The reason for this is, I think, that all our experiences (including the reading of books) eventually resolve themselves into memories and that all memories, as they recede into the murk of the past, increasingly approach a semblance to dreams. The implications of this fairly uncontroversial idea are worth considering. I do not deny that there are differences between undergoing an experience and merely reading or dreaming of it that are obvious and important, but with time, these differences diminish. Speaking for myself, it is not an exaggeration to say that the grisly death of Ana Karenina or Ishmael's first night on the Piquod are just as salient in my memory, and therefore, in some sense, just as real, as my first day of school or last night's dream. And this is not due to the lucidity of my imagination—I don't claim to be an especially lucid dreamer or a reader with especially lucid powers of imagination. It is merely to point out that the fallibility, or impermanence, of human memory operates as an equalizing force on the three spheres of experience, on dream, reading and reality, which come increasingly to resemble each other. I draw two conclusions from this. The first is that Edgar Poe was not being merely mystical when he asked, "Is all we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" The second is that perhaps the worldly distain with which some people view bookishness ("Books are not enough," declaims the man of action, "you have to get out there and live life boldly!") may be an objection of short term validity. My recollection of reading Memoirs of a Geisha may be no less salient than the memories of the elderly Japanese woman whose life inspired the book. For many of us, reality is a dull, repetitious and mediocre affair; books, on the other hand, offer up a wide field of extraordinary experiences, experiences often unattainable in real life. Like the growth rings of a tree trunk, these memories form around a common center, but they are not the memories of a single being. To read deeply, then, is to become a plural entity, a crowd. |