Overlapping Books

An experiment in "polyphonic reading".

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“[A library] was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another …”

[Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose”]

It’s not always clear what links a person’s reading from one book to the next to the next; the intemperance of whim and invisible workings of the subconscious frequently subvert our best intentions to read an author’s oeuvre or read every angle on a single subject. Sometimes, though, we notice a thread stitching our reading together from within, creating a new fabric of ideas taken from the pages of disparate books. This happened to me recently. I was re-reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and among many direct quotations in my notebook I jotted down this paragraph:

“It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing.”
~ Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

I copied this out because the slogan “The Personal Is Political” has always made me queasy. I can’t stand its anti-humanistic sentiment that pretends to parity but actually subjugates the love, family, faith, labour, friendship, and purpose of the personal to the temporal concerns of activist politics. When, a few weeks after Nafisi, I re-read Christopher Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian, I was gratified to rediscover this line and scribbled it into my notebook:

“I remember very well the first time I heard the saying ‘The Personal Is Political.’ […] I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they ‘felt’, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for.”
~ Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

Not long after that, I read some C. S. Lewis and copied out the following:

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either come to regard it as the natural food of the mind — if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else — then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”
~ C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

A good quotation is often a distillation of a larger idea; it’s a mistake to think a clever line on its own proves or disproves much of anything. The quoted paragraph above is simply the essence of a greater examination of the place of politics in our personal lives. That distillation reaches it purest and most resonant form in the line:

We think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else.

Lewis’ passage is much deeper and therefore more satisfying than Hitchens’ response to the question of whether the personal should indeed be made political. The Hitch paragraph gives voice to my disdain, and to my suspicion that many of those who begin their speech with announcements about who they are do so to mask that they have nothing else to contribute to the conversation. The Lewis paragraph, on the other hand, patiently articulates a more serious set of criticisms.

Without my notebook of quotations (which I call my BOB, my Book of Books), I likely wouldn’t have spotted the continuity of this conversation about politics in my reading. That conversation is merely one part of a grand dialogue between books across cultures and through time, a dialogue that I might, if it didn’t sound so unforgivably like academic jargon, call a “polylogue”. Actually, I like it. And it lends a name to what I’m going to attempt below: an experiment we can call “polyphonic reading”.

I decided to go back through my BOB and look out for commonalities. I found agreements and disputes, quotes that built on other quotes, a sentence here that refuted another line there, and many overlaps that fleshed out ideas or that Frankensteined them into something new, like a composite image made out of scraps of photographs. I wanted to know what it would look like if I moved from one quotation to another in single steps, be it an echo of a notion or a refutation of an idea or something more subtle and subjective. What follows is a fairly stripped-down recitation of just one of the dialogic narratives I found.

“‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”
~ Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

“Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things.”
~ Carlos Fuentes, Diana

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. […] In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”
~ C. S. Lewis, The Reading Life

“I am composed of myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.”
~ Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
~ Sylvia Plath, Journals

“Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others.”
~ Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
~ James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.”
~ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote …”
~Shakespeare, Sonnet 141

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Thinking has nothing to do with calculations, logic, or crosswords, but [is] actually a magic spell of speed and power, of cruel pain, and ecstasy, the open wound we’re determined to make deeper.”
~ Jérôme Ferrari, The Principle

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
~ Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication…”
Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

“By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up.”
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“What destroys fools? A longing for Art and Beauty…”
Sergei Dovlatov, The Suitcase

“The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”
~ Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.”
~ Jorge Luis Borges, The Homeric Versions

“Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us.”
Daniel Kraus, The Shape of Water

“He misuses [books] quite ruthlessly — despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public — to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditional reflexes of his colon.”
~ Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“What else have you underlined?”
”What everybody underlines,” she said. “Everything that says ‘me’.”
~ Philip Roth, “Zuckerman Unbound”

For more on keeping your own Book of Books:

Reading Fast, Writing Slow