On never finishing bloody anything
I remember once, during the very brief mid-year holidays in second year, that I – much enamoured of the image I had of the endless leisure time that was to be available to me, now that the dastardly semester was, finally, over – went to the local library and got out about nine books, thinking that I would read them all within a week and a half. They were things that interested me at the time – things I felt that I should be reading, or would like to read. There was Kafka’s The Castle and America; Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject (I don’t believe I’d ever read any Zizek previously); a book on French philosophy in the 20th century; an “Introducing”-type book on Sartre (with cartoons); and, though I can’t remember the title, a book by Henry James, whose Washington Square I very much enjoyed reading in Year 11 – indeed, I often think back upon the time in which I read this, in the last part of the long Summer holidays before the year commenced, as presenting an ‘ideal instance’ of enjoying literature: this was one of the few times that I have given myself freely to the reading of a book, and read without calculating in my mind what percentage of the pages I have consumed so far (though this ideal provides the flavour that the word ‘literature’ bears for me, whenever I think to myself that I am a person who enjoys literature). In any case, it came to me vividly just now, as I opened the pantry hungrily at 5am, sneaking about the dim house whose windows cannot escape dawn, that all I read of this ‘unnamed’ Henry James book was the one-paragraph biography on the first page, but that nevertheless, I was presented with a discrete moment of joy, when I found in this paragraph the phrase: “James had a desultory education”. Desultory? I made the effort and dragged out the dictionary – and to my delight, found that it meant ‘to be always turning from one thing to another, without finishing’. How wonderful, there is a word for it, I thought – and immediately, felt as though I’d pinned a previously uncategorised, never-before isolated part of my character. Desultory.
Even now, I must start reading at least one new book each week. But I very rarely finish any. I use Metcards as bookmarks for this very reason: I need a hoard, a stack of the things, to keep abreast of all the tomes that I am but sixty (or more frequently, twenty) pages into. I enjoy getting a sense of books, reading the blurbs and prefaces. I enjoy beginnings, but rarely reach endings. Also, I am increasingly given to wanton sprees of book buying – a sort of retail therapy. Perhaps I believe, somehow, that if I own the books, that I am one step closer to owning the ideas therein. Accordingly, I came across the insight, or perhaps formulated the hypothesis, not so long ago, that I only fetishise those books (that is, their physical presence, glorying over their existence, their typescript, the thickness of their paper) that I haven’t read.
Finishing asides:
1. I really hate this blog layout. It’s much too neat and compartmentalised.
2. I’ve been reading Proust. Can you tell?
