"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might have never seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth" (Marcel Proust, "Time Regained").
All the greatest works of literature are timeless precisely because they had their greatness sourced from the beauty and originality of the individual soul expressed aesthetically. The greatness of these works was not supported on politics, culture, economics, or anything changing and varying with the times.
The meditative nature of reading is, in my experience, best demonstrated by reading passages of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." Such an enormous novel transcends mere plot-work and invites one to participate in its every sentence. Every sentence is a beautiful work of art not just to read, but to hear its rhythm and flow, feel its pauses and see its interplay with the images it conjures up in the mind and the feelings it engenders in the heart.
Proust is famous for his extremely long sentences, but these sentences are much different than James Joyce's or Virginia Woolf's or any other writer I know of for that matter, because they are easy and natural to follow along with. They read like an inner voice conjuring images and feelings and moments as if the reader were being gently pulled along in a car across a sprawling landscape of beautiful images crystallizing and dissolving into and out of shape.
In order for me to correctly read Proust - to follow his run-on sentences that often span a page in length - I have to get myself into a sort of meditative state of mind, like a trance where I tune into the rhythms of his words. Sometimes it even seems that my physiology changes. My heartbeat slows and I become more receptive and sensitive to the sensations rising in my chest from his words. The outside sounds dim and the pages of the book seem to clarify and sparkle in the light of my focused sight and I am astonished by the greatness of the artistry I am witnessing and by the ease at which he does it.
At this point I would quote a passage of Proust to give an example of what I am appreciating, but it would be way to many words for this post.
It seems to me that the appreciation of reading has been diminishing in today's age of fast-paced living and huge amounts of information. It presents to us a double-edged sword where the inundation of information can be positive for people who can sort through and discern the valuable worthwhile information from the distracting unworthy information.
In an interview on PBS in 2000, Ray Suarez interviewed one of the greatest literary critics, Harold Bloom, on reading. Here's what he had to say:
"I think reading is in trouble no matter how many people crowd the bookstores and no matter what profits the publishers are turning. It's in trouble because we do not consider how to read and why."
Ray Suarez replied, "So you have no truck with those who say, 'well, at least they're reading,' whether speaking of adults or children."
Bloom replies, "Ray, they're not really. Their eyes are passing over a page. They are turning the page. Their minds are being numbed by cliché. No demands are being made upon them. Nothing... Nothing is happening to them. They're being schooled in what you might call unreality or the avoidance of reality. They are going in every direction except inward into the self."
I am in agreement with Bloom here, where in order to read successfully reading needs to be a very active process where what is being relayed is being assessed in comparison to the individual's self. Something should be happening to the reader, within the reader, besides the accumulation of information.
Today, it seems that most reading and most writing is done like a movie, where people read to get to the point of the book, to get to the end and to be dazzled by its "wow factor," but not for the appreciation of the art of reading and writing and the beauty furnished in every sentence. I am sure there are many modern examples of this type of writing, but I see it best in classical literature, in Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Emerson and Whitman, among many others.
Another conception of reading is what I would call the Emersonian conception of reading, that it is an act that needs to be done carefully and correctly with an attentive and discerning eye in order to take from books the materials which will accurately and originally furnish the present moment and safeguard against the repetition and regurgitation of the past.
