Books and the many-sided life.(readers and reading)

WHEN I WAS about sixteen, a friend of mine, an Indian boy who played in my cricket team and who possessed both a strong, direct intelligence and a delicate and delightful sense of humour, asked me why I bothered to read. I remember struggling to answer him. His point was that reading was passive. "When you're reading," he said, "you're not--you're not really doing anything."

To readers, or people who define themselves as readers (a group not quite corresponding to the former), these words must sound bad: ignorant, brutish, exactly-the-thing-we've-been-struggling-against-all-our-lives stuff. But that is not how they sit in my memory. You had to be there, to see his face when he said it, and to hear the tone in his voice. There was no malice, nor even a hint of disrespect for the written word as the preserve of an irrelevant race of obsolete human wildlife (there were other boys, and teachers, who thought like this). Rather, this boy just wanted to know. He was interested--because he was an intelligent and noble soul, and because he had never read a book in his life unless required to do so by schools or parents--in my mysteries.

I tried to explain. I told him that reading, being immersed in a book completely, was like nothing else in this world, and that, actually, it was like leaving this world altogether--like, somehow, escaping time and space. I was confused. I sounded confused. I knew perfectly well why I read. At sixteen, I lived almost solely in and for the otherworld of the written word. Yet I could not--profound and simple irony--put the visceral joy of reading into words so another human being without experience of it could understand. (But that is a perennial pity: all our best joys, or pains, or thoughts, do not quite translate.)

A little later, perhaps the next day, more thoughts came to me. In the manner of my mind, I remembered the words of a character in an Arthurian fantasy-historical novel I had read two years before. This man, an illiterate warrior, explained to another that he saw reading as valuable because it allowed a man to take stock of the experiences of other men, to take from their lives lessons he could use in his own. In other words, reading gave a man the gig of being able to live more than one life. At the time, I thought this true, and it gave me a small, hidden and intense delight to think so. But I no longer think it true, or, at least, I think it not quite as true as I once did.

I no longer think that books, or history, which is and has always been the passion of my reading and thinking, can allow you to live another's life, to know their heart or mind, or to see purely into their world and their time (for their world and their time are not ours, as history, not philosophy, has taught me). Rather, books allow you to see more purely into your own thinking and your own time. And it is here that history, with its revealing glimpse into the time-bound nature of thought, of feeling, of the very structure of mental and physical events (including such "unalterable" physical and biological forces as the sexual drive or the inherited shape and form of a human body), is especially useful. For history can save you from being a slave to your own time.

So I feel now that books actually give a man (or woman!) a greater gift than the ability to live many lives. They give him the ability to live his own life in a way and at a level beyond what he could otherwise. They give him, not more experiences of others, but more experiences of his own.

READING IS DIFFERENT from the experience of some other art forms, like, say, watching a movie. Much as I ...