I wonder if others face a similar predicament. Sometimes when I’m reading, I can’t help but think I ought to be reading something else. Negotiating some Nietzsche, I feel I ought to read an ancient text. Confronting a literary classic, I’m drawn to a classic of theology. Anxious to finish an ancient text, I’m equally anxious to catch up with recent scholarship. What is this anxiety that the text and meaning I seek is always elsewhere?
The predicament is partly–at least as I speculate–a fantasy that there’s a text, a single sentence really, that tells it all, that sums up the mysteries of the universe; it’s quite a burden to lay on a sentence even of Proustian length. It’s quite an expectation, really, even for a sacred scriptural text, which of course does not make sense on its own, but calls for all the critical and creative skills a human being can muster, not to mention a mine of learning to draw on as one can. If language is, as we have learned, a constant play of difference and of intertextual allusion, then there can be no isolated sentence that tells much of anything at all. In a sense we need every other text that we can find to make sense of whatever sentence we have before us. I suspect this is part of the reason that those of us who become devoted readers can never imagine the enterprise coming to an end. There is no single sentence that says everything there is to say. And even if such a sentence did exist, I would not be able to read it.
So where does this fantasy come from, that a single sentence or line might answer to all one’s literary or metaphysical longing? I suspect that part of the answer lies in the usual longing for origins, the sense that there is a single font in the garden from which we’ve fallen, where everything made unified sense, where to speak was also to act and action was its own mode of speaking in a world where all was safely coherent. It is perhaps a cozy vision that fuels humans’ longing to return, a nostalgia like none other. It’s also a vision of the world that the theology I find most compelling long ago eschewed, if in fact it ever held such a vision at all. In the play of evolution, the only fully coherent and isolated garden is the one we construct out of longing and imagination. To say this is not to say that the story of the Garden in Genesis is not true, but that it’s true the way great myth is true, by articulating a tale about things we otherwise cannot know or say. In my view we owe such a great story as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden more honor than simple literalism can accomplish.
But the sense of lofty origins is not limited to religious longings. In one of his loveliest poems, “The Makers,” Howard Nemerov wrote of “those first and grreatest poets, / So lofty and disdainful of renown / They left us not a name to know them by.” These are the figures, “greater even than Orpheus,” who “were the ones that in whatever tongue / Worded the world, that were the first to say / Star, water, stone, that said the visible / And made it bring invisibles to view.” I take the poem to be about the fantasy that such primal poets once were, that they lived in a golden age from which we’ve fallen but to which we might return.
I suspect that another influence on this longing might be the technology of the book, which appears for all the world to contain language and knowledge in an isolated form. I take the book off the shelf and read one sentence and then another and another and so on before I turn a page, and even though everything connects to everything else, including every sentence in the book I read, the technology of the codex form reinforces a sense that these are isolated sentences, bits of knowledge that stand on their own, and pretty soon the model of knowledge becomes the isolated thinker like Descartes in his heated room redoing human knowledge on his own.
Of course television and radio technologies have long worked against this sense of isolation, and now the internet is doing even more, for it plays out in quite literal terms the links among all human discourses, and it’s even leading us to rethink the codex form, which turns out to have been a hyperlink system all along.