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Reading in a Timely Way
May 24, 2009

I recently re-subscribed to the New Yorker after an absence of several years. Their special price was sufficiently tempting to overcome even the memory of three months’ worth of magazines piled up in a corner of my living room, a pile I promised myself I would read every time a new issue arrived. This time I made a strict rule for myself: if the current issue isn’t read by the time the new one comes in, it gets tossed into the recycling bin. Unread. 

No more piles. No more guilt. I either make the time to read it that week or I won’t.

Well, last night I did find the time to read it, and I found myself promptly caught up in “Face Value,” an article by Patricia Marx on the luxury watch business. It seems to me it would be more accurate to say it is an article on the time business, even though what it focuses on is the annual trade show for the watch industry, Baselworld.

What struck me about this article was not its emphasis on the industry or the prices but on the point made by Jean-Claude Biver, CEO of Hublot, when he advised the writer not to buy a watch to make money but because “You must buy culture, trust. . . . eternity. And, when you buy eternity, you are as close to God as you can get.”

The relationship of time to culture is a subject that holds some fascination for me. One might say it’s an odd fascination because although I have a collection of books on and about time—its history, development, influence, scientific advancements—I actually have very few things in my house that remind me of it. One clock radio that I use to wake up for work. The clock on my Macintosh. And that’s it. I think the reason I abhor being surrounded by reminders of arbitrary time that they create a sense of artificiality. Having reminders all around, including on my body, is anathema to me. I eat when I like to eat when I am hungry, not when it’s six o’clock. I like to go to bed when I am tired, not at 10:00 p.m. I like to feel time, not be told it.

Jack Smith, the late Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote an essay on time. My yellowed and fading copy is not dated (time-stamped in the proper parlance), but that doesn’t matter. It’s timeless. He had been asked to define the word, a task he turned over to his readers. The responses ran from cynical to poetical, and included this quote from Quentin’s father in The Sound and the Fury: “clocks slay time; that time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops  does time come to life.”

But is that true? Certain parts of our lives are ruled by time: measuring a heartbeat in an emergency room, cooking a soufflé, winning a Olympic footrace, determining safety factors for deep sea divers or high altitude mountain climbers. That we divide time into seconds or minutes is less relevant than that we have a way to measure essential factors.

Reading is not something highly valued today by many, certainly not as valued as making or spending money, something revered as nearly god-like in this economic-based culture. It’s time spent that requires nothing more than attention. It’s time spent that delivers immense value but only to its reader.

A book that has been with me since I purchased it new in 1982 (and in which I keep Smith’s article) is Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin. Through a series of vignettes using philosophy, science, literature, history, art, and personal experience, Grudin examines the concept of time. I find myself often picking up the book to read one, two or more of the short thoughts. One which has stayed with me in admittedly amorphous memory until I look it up each time is this:
Those pilgrims who, as is customary, place all their hopes in arriving at some wished-for chapel or shrine, are unaware of the true purpose of their pilgrimage; for the fulfillment of that purpose resides equally in the exhausting approach, the chosen encounter and the silent journey home. Similar are the readers who, enthralled by some work of literature, race through it with all thoughts concentrated on the story’s end. They miss the real end, the final cause and full pleasure of the work, which as Conrad tells us is in every line. Intent on the temporal or sequential structure of the story or poem, they  miss its spatial structure, which exists all at once and as though outside of time; they enjoy the product of art but are blind to the art itself.
I actually like time; it’s the rigidity of time as a sequential thing that bothers me. I prefer to see it as an experience, like reading. Kairos, the ancient Greek word referring to an experience of time, seems the perfect definition of time for reading, for absorbing the art of literature. It just seems a better way to keep time than by using a watch. 

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are none this upcoming week. However, imagine a book festival so popular that half of the population attends! It actually happens.
 
The Pub House:
The New York Review of Books is not often thought of as a publisher, but it partially is. Its publishing arm has three divisions. NYRB Classics, which has been around since 1999, has published more than 200 books that focus on “outstanding fiction and nonfiction from all ages and around the world,” from authors as diverse as Euripides and Dante to Vaily Grossman and Mavis Gallant, from  literary criticism to cookbooks. NYRB Collections offers books that brings together essays that have been published by NYRB contributors. The sharp, incisive  debates that define the publication can now be had in book form. The New York Review Children’s Collection issues reprints of what it terms “great” books for children in beautiful hardbound editions with stunning illustrations. These are probably best for slightly older children who can appreciate the beauty of the books. Parents will want to, and should, save them even when their children outgrow them for who wouldn’t want to look back on one’s childhood books, especially when done as well as these are, decades later?

Of Interest:
Medieval Writing is a web site devoted to “medieval manuscripts through the medium of the arcane art of paleography, or the history and decoding of the forms of handwriting.” Drs. John and Dianne Tillotson, specialists in medieval history, have produced this fascinating place that not only points up the practical information around the subject but manages to impart an extraordinary enthusiasm for the manuscripts and the writing on them, and what they represent as well. 

This Week . . .
starting off with Memorial Day, I think it might be good for each of us to reflect on some books that we have read that remind us about the impact of war on our lives. Regardless of how we feel about the current U.S. involvement in Iraq, it is fact that war has been a part of America since the beginning. What books, fiction or nonfiction, have you read that involve war either directly or peripherally? How did they make you feel? My literary influences (in no particular order) have included The Illiad, Beowulf, Henry V, Don Quixote, The Face of War, The Caine Mutiny, The Red Badge of Courage, The Best and the Brightest, From Here to Eternity, MASH, All Quiet on the Western Front, Lusitania, The March, The Women Who Wrote the War, Three Soldiers, Dr. Zhivago, Slaughterhouse Five, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Six Red Months in Russia: An Observer’s Account of Russia Before and During the Proletarian Dictatorship; The Guns of August, A Bright Shining Lie, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wave Me Goodbye, The Boat, and 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. It’s an interesting mix. I didn’t like them all equally. But what they have all done, each in its own way, is add to my unwavering opposition to war. However, they have also brought me, I hope, a wiser and more sympathetic understanding of views opposite mine. Books can teach us so much if we let them. It’s a thought worth keeping in mind the next time we are tempted to dismiss out of hand a book in opposition to our beliefs but worthy of our time and mind.  

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren

 

 

 
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