Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages
This is another bargain book buy. I found this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble shortly after I got the Barnes and Noble membership card: a little plastic enabler that lives in my wallet, crying out with an innocent sounding voice, "If you don't spend at least $250 dollars at Barnes and Noble this year, you got ripped off!" (Is there anyone out there worried about my ability to spend $250 at Barnes and Noble?)
Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.
As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.
The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.
Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.
It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.
Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.
"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)
I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)
One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)
And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.
Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.
"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)
It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.
And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.
"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)
Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.
As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.
The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.
Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.
It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.
Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.
"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)
I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)
One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)
And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.
Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.
"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)
It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.
And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.
"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)
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