Can One Read Too Much?
James Wood on Libraries and Intellectual Gluttony
James Wood asks whether private libraries reveal or hide their owners. As he packs up and sorts through his deceased father-in-law’s books, Wood comes to the conclusion that the task is no more meaningful or instructive than sorting through his remaining shirts. In the end, books are just things—he claims—like any other. This is the conclusion of the final essay in his book, Serious Noticing—a strange note on which to end for a literary critic who has devoted his life to reading and commentary. Discussing the critic Frank Kermode, whose book collection of 50+ years was accidentally discarded by movers, Wood describes his envy at being so relieved. He vows not to burden his descendants with his own book collection.
Wood’s reflections raise the question of what good a life of reading is. Is the literary critic just a special type of obsessive, no different in outline from the gamer or the foodie or the stamp collector? Does it matter what we collect, or is the content secondary, the curation equally empty when viewed from a zoom-out view? Asked differently, at what margin does a life of reading reflect diminishing returns? Can one be an intellectual glutton?
I’m of several minds on these questions. On the one hand, I don’t know that many great writers are particularly wise. I like Kafka and Benjamin on the page, but I’m not sure I’d want to emulate them. A lot of great writers tend to be depressives and/or narcissists. On the other hand, so what? Sebald’s Austerlitz is a transcendent work. Does it matter how I’d find him in person? Wood’s reflections on Primo Levi are moving. I don’t need to have lunch with him, let alone seek his counsel.
On the other hand, words and sentences are the basis units of thought. Great writers draw our attention to the medium in which we exist and give us greater freedom in our own relationship to self-expression. Great tories give us access to our own brokenness, our own internal conflicts. This is why the best writers are often best at excavating their brokenness rather than sharing their conclusions. (Novelists rarely smile in their headshots, but for self-help “gurus” a smile is de rigeur.) Even just the phrase “terraced grief” which I came upon in Wood’s writing struck me as a gift, a delightful turn of phrase that gave sound and image to an inarticulate feeling.
How can it be that books are just things and that books can be life-changing? Do we simply fool ourselves when we speak affectionately about a life of reading? Do we over-estimate our capacity for transformation? Or do books offer us a promise of something more, a promise continuously interrupted by reality, but one that is no less true, if only we could wait one more day, turn one more page?
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