Inside My Reading Mind

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts is a reader’s autobiography and a lament for the lost importance of literature.  I’m not sure I’ve read all 14 chapters, but I love chapter six so much, I wish I had written it.  Called “The Shadow Life of Reading,” Birkerts reflects on the relationship between our mind in a book and our mind away from the book, a relationship that intrigues me, puzzles me, amazes me, and moves me.

I just recently finished Room by Emma Donoghue, a novel that describes the life of a young woman imprisoned in a 11 x 11 windowless room by an abductor.  The story is told through the voice of her five year old son Jack.  Jack was born in captivity and has never been outside the room.  The reader could focus on the hideousness of the crime that brought and keeps Jack and his mother in the room, but it is written in such a way that the reader can also focus on how the two perceive the world through their restrictive lenses.  I never managed to really imagine myself in their shoes, but I did get so immersed in what it was like for them; it was as if I had entered another world.  And at times, when I wasn’t reading the book, something would happen to suddenly thrust me back into the world of Jack and his mother.

Birkerts says,

When we read, we create and then occupy a hitherto nonexistent interior locale.  Regardless of what happens on the page, the simple fact that we have cleared room for these peculiar figments we now preside over gives us a feeling of freedom and control.  No less exalting is the sensation of inner and outer worlds coinciding, going on simultaneously, or very nearly so.

Birkerts doesn’t completely describe these two worlds as they exist for me.  Maybe no one can.  But he acknowledges it and attempts to describe it with words.  For me, this is reassuring and exciting.  My intuition tells me that the better I can describe this sensation of living in a book, the deeper I will experience it.  Birkerts goes on to explain that this world exists not only as I read but after I put the book down, hence his title “The Shadow Life of Books.”  He says, once he has opened the gate into that “ulterior realm,” he has entered a “place I will at least partially inhabit as I go about my daily tasks.”  Later he says, “Now I have occupied the book and the book has begun to occupy me…I carry the work everywhere…for the duration of my reading—and maybe less vividly after—I will shift between two centers of awareness…I find the back-and-forth movement—an abstract sort of friction—invigorating.”

Reading Room, I found myself returning to the room while dealing with outer world of daily life.  This visit to the inner world of a book is somewhat like visiting a new country where I can enjoy the experience all the while knowing that a part of me is outside it.  There is too much about this place that I don’t understand.  But I treasure the shadow life of both my travels to new lands and travels to new books.

It’s not surprising that some novels create a more memorable shadow than others.  Some novels may be hard to put down as I rush on to find out what will happen next.  But when I put the book down to enter again the outer world, the shadow is faint, and when I get to the end of the book, when I finally find out what happened, there is no shadow left at all.  There have been a few times in my life that I was so taken over by the world in the book that I had to read it again.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out why some books leave such a big shadow and some don’t.  Does a vivid shadow mean the book had value beyond entertainment?  I somehow think it does, but I’m not sure why.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo left a big shadow for me.  But I can’t figure out its value beyond entertainment.  Maybe it is like a vivid dream.  I may not know where it came from, but something in my psyche thinks I need this story.  Right now, I want to read novels that leave a strong and vivid shadow.  That’s how I’ll continue to study this phenomenon.