In another post I wrote about the experience of not reading Roberto Bola??o, and yesterday, as I headed into hour 39 of the 43-hour audiobook of Judt’s magisterial Postwar, I thought more about not-reading. In that listening is not reading, and in that these days one of our greatest activities as readers is not reading–there is so much to read, so many options from which to choose, we have to constantly not read to stay afloat. Exhibit A: the internet. I hope–I imagine–I am not the only person who has trouble reading anything more than a page or two long on the internet. An anxiety rises within me, that this piece is not the one I should be reading, how do I know that this is where I should spend my time, is the piece that people will be talking about and thus I’ll have wished I read. Thus my go-to mode of reading online is to read the first one or two paragraphs, then start skimming, picking up maybe the first and last sentence of every paragraph, then reading the conclusion, then at least the first few comments, to see if the comments are worthwhile in some way or at least scandalous.
But this is folly, and embarrassing–some of these pieces are, I can tell right away, extraordinary, fascinating, beautiful, but for whatever reason I feel I don’t have the time or capacity to read them as I discover them, and so I make endless lists of pieces I intend to get back to, to actually read. For instance: this, this, and this (in the latter case: did you know that defendants ever had the opportunity to address the court in real life, not just in TV? Truly amazing. “If you side with Mr Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away.”)
Postwar is the first audiobook I’ve listened to start to finish; listening to a book gives you, I think, a strange relationship to time. I am also reading (very slowly, perhaps I started it one Thanksgiving and will finish it the next) Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization, which is some 1200 pages long. I do not know, though, how many hours that is, and won’t think of it in those terms (in my experience the only reason to measure a book in hours is if you are getting paid to read it, or if you have only so many hours before class). But 43 hours seems so impressive: almost two days of my life will have been occupied by a single book.
Except that I won’t quite have “read” it, the purist in me thinks. For instance, when a British voice reads to me in a measured tone for some hours about the formation of the European Union, I may without meaning to fall asleep. I wake up and am still listening; some time has passed. Was I reading in the meantime? Certainly De Gaulle has appeared in my dreams. Also–and this seems particularly worth noting for a work of such historical breadth–when listening you can’t flip back. If you can’t remember why you recognize this or that name or what that clash was about, there’s no help for you, nothing like an index or your visual memory of where something fell on which page. Rather the memory is: the trees outside my window, or were my neighbors riding their trikes in the driveway (as they were all through the student uprisings of the ’60s).
I ought to have some grand conclusion about the future of reading, e-books, the generation gap in terms of comfort with reading on screens… But I don’t have anything, and unfortunately I know that if I myself were reading this post, I may not have clicked past the jump. But one thing I will note about reading on the internet is that there are many more pictures of animals on the internet than there are even words about animals in most books. In the 43 hours of Postwar, there has not been (and of course you can understand why) a single sentence describing an animal or a tree (that I recall; see caveat above). But once online, you will be surrounded by pictures of kittens, skunks with their heads in jars of peanut butter, dolphins, all sorts of images of the natural world, whether news or wall photos or lolcats. Similarly, my next-door neighbors will trip over me as I sit in the yard with Judt on my iPod and they chase butterflies. In sum (hardly), it seems there are many ways that we keep an eye out for everything we can’t read.