There’s a famous Kafka quote that maybe now we can agree is a bit worn out — that a book worth reading is like an axe for a frozen sea inside the reader. The good books “wound and stab us”, says Kafka, like an axe busting through the hard layers of ice to the flood underneath.
But who is this fearsome axe holder, and why do they swing the heavy blade so hard now overhand and down to slice at the ice of a whole frozen sea? Can you freeze a whole sea? And if you did find it frozen, a whole sea, why exactly would you want to hack through it with an axe? To get flooded, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Maybe the story is just incomplete or poorly told, and the axe holder is only hacking open a little hole, down which they can put a line for ice fishing. They’ve brought something to sit on and a book to occupy the time while they wait for a bite, which then will mean dinner.
I like this a bit better, but “we should only read the kind of books that wound and stab us like a hungry ice fisherman in search of a dinner” doesn’t quite sound the same. And life isn’t really like that, at least not anymore, or perhaps not yet. We are not old enough to play at being Montaigne in his tower, retired from the world, free to read at our leisure, but neither are we young enough to read of tragedy and say to ourselves: “At least this part of life hasn’t quite come for me yet. I still have some time.”
No, we are in the midst of it, this flood of significance, and the waves of the events of the world come crashing. Each one is a judgment, a deeming come to test us to see whether it will hit and then wash, or will shove us under.
Books are like this too — they are waves in which we float or drown. And maybe I’ll say — if only to get away from the metaphor — that a good critic sits on the beach at ease under an intelligible sun, free from water, blessedly dry.
Go no further with this and stay here with me on the beach. I’m glad you didn’t drown in the book.
We read books and they read us. Ask always what it would have made of you, had you walked into it. Is there a place for you in it? Where would the book have put you? Which character in the book are you most like? Would you have loved as the protagonist loved, would you have hated? Does the form of the book’s tragedy find a counterpart in your own life? Is that consoling, or not?
In opening a book we risk the terror of being read better than we read ourselves, of finding our own life story better told than we can tell it. Or worse, our life story mocked and contained, made ironic. You write your own life like a book and find upon stumbling into someone else’s that your own is insufficient. Your actual lived life, a less worthy piece of writing than pieces of writing you come upon. Humiliating.
A book of which we haven’t yet made sense but which in our guts we feel has made too much sense of us is an offense, an object of disgust. It should not be able to interpret us better than we can it. We are more than ink marks and typeface. We must always be fighting our way out of that. Reading books then is like combat, like war — to the death!!
Maybe metamorphosis is better than war. Let’s say instead that the reader reads in search of shapes to shift into, and that the human is not a book, and so has no first or final shape.
To be transfixed by a shape is to become it, or rather you wake up from the transfixing as yourself and find that in the act of perceiving the shape of another human there, through the book, that you have now become something else. You write then to articulate that something else, so you can see it clearly, so you can see how you’ve been changed by the book.
After you have given it form, do you then cast it off and yourself become formless again? Is there ever such a thing as coming back to your one self, finally and for good? No. But who am I if I have no shape like the shapes that I find in books?
But try the other thought — it shouldn’t be so bad, taking on so many forms. Why be afraid? Through you many voices speak. Your self is something else, the silence before the speaking begins, and after it’s over. You need not be at war; only allow yourself to be changed.
Far off is a book I’m journeying toward, final resting castle for the never-resting mind. It will be finished when I am.
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I love how you play with Kafka’s ice metaphor, turning it to ice fishing, a wave, and the beach, and then abandoning it altogether in favor of a better idea.
I just finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which was just excellent. Your invitation to think about which character I most resembled gave me some insight into myself, and the book too--so thank you!
Fantastic. When my inevitable best seller is published I’m tapping you to do the male parts of the audiobook.