But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.
-Elizabeth von Arnim
Sitting on the floor.
Tag Archives: reading
Books for bedtime.
In that bedtime span between climbing under the blankets and being fully asleep, the mind needs somehow to go from a state of being actively engaged with conscious thoughts, to being turned off to all of that, on its way to dreamland. I haven’t studied the science of this except as a participant in and observer of own experiments, which have led me to theories and conclusions.
It appears that my own mind has been trained to need a certain routine in order to make that transition, which is the activity of reading. I guess it’s not surprising, since most of my life I have enjoyed a book or magazine before bed, or in bed before sleep. I used to keep at it for hours sometimes, but in recent years it may only take five minutes before I begin to drift off, or one paragraph.
Nights when I was dead tired and not anxious about anything, I thought surely I could bypass this mental step and just conk out. But I tried that more than once, and would lie there for an hour, praying, counting sheep, thinking of beautiful places — but never sleeping, until I would turn on the light again and read a few lines. Then, in two minutes the nodding off would begin.
The sort of book I want has narrowed to a genre of its own: Bedtime Books. Requirements: Not too demanding, but well written, not too dark or exciting, and not so long that it makes a book that is large and heavy. The print is the one aspect that can’t be small! It can’t be on Audible because I’m trying to keep my phone in the other room at night. Smallish paperbacks are ideal, so I visited the local paperback store last week for the first time in many years, to browse the shelves; I was looking for the smaller, “trade paperbacks,” and found quite a few possibilities. (I traded in $31 worth of books that I was glad to let go of.)
Afterward I stopped at the library to pick up two cookbooks on hold, and I remembered that the local branch has a used bookstore, so I found as many more small books there. Here is the stack of all that I came home with, which I hope might last me for years.
Because when I have a chance to listen to Audible books, or read philosophy or theology or Great Novels, at any other time of day, I won’t be making progress in these smaller reads. It’s good to be so tired when one drops into bed that only a few paragraphs get read.
I think I’ve only read one of these before, but I bet my readers know many of them well. I’ve read other books by Natsume Soseki, Walls, George, Lowry and Doig, so I knew those authors were worth another try, but several of these titles are brand new to me, and I hope I will find them worth finishing. I don’t want to fall asleep out of boredom!
All the cozy things a girl needs.
What more could a girl want on a fall evening? Here (in a photo Pippin sent) Ivy has Fred the new kitten, Black Beauty which she is continuing from where we left off together last week, a soft blanket and the flannel nightgown I made for her last year about this time. Oh, and a black stuffie horse is peeking out from under her book. I wonder if he is reading along silently, or being read to. I find the scene pretty inspiring!
Touring a house of endless rooms.
BOOKS
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night;
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boys and his sister receding into the words.
-Billy Collins
This poem was the perfect one for me to find right now, because I myself have been acting out all the verbs: following, straining, hearing and touring… and listening hard, to the humming of a choir. This choir of authors aren’t all consciously “singing” in harmony, or even intending to write about the same things, but their voices, the sounds, the crumbs I am following “across a page of fresh snow” all seem to be parts of a whole. The rooms I am touring are all in one house; it must be the place where the human soul lives.
My “circles of light” sometimes seem like a 60’s light show, beautiful and confusing, when I am waiting rather for illumination and clarity. So many authors have shined their little lights out into the world, but how many reveal the reality of things?
Over the last several months I have been reading a lot, with no resulting book reviews and few even small illuminations of the sort I might write about here. The Eucharist was very focused and wonderful and I do want to say some things about it eventually, but instead of stopping for that I kept working my way through Irrational Man, which is such a tour de force that it’s hard to know what to say about — everything. It mostly makes me want to read more books that William Barrett reminds me of.
Like Flight From Woman by Karl Stern, which I read some years ago and thought brilliant; but at the time I knew I needed to read it a second time to digest it. Barrett explains the duality of selves in Sartre’s philosophy, how he considers not the “fruitful, excessive, fruitful blooming nature” to be the true self, but only that of the radically free and active man who has projects. Now I want to go back and read Stern on this topic.
But I am determined to finish a couple more books first. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is like another long chapter, maybe the closing chapter, of Western Philosophy, so it will be good if I can move right on to finishing it after Barrett.
On my recent road trip I listened to Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, by Christina Thompson, a title so embarrassing on several fronts that I considered leaving this accomplishment unrecorded. But even this book, which was about as deep as I could go on all that freeway driving, provided a few revealing glimpses of how ideas from the other books I mentioned play out in real life, especially the central one: What is the self?
About halfway through The Cross of Loneliness I began to have a difficult time knowing what these two men were talking about, but I will finish that book, too, before long. My really easy, small book to read under the covers right now is The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I found in the little free library up at the lake.
And then, the sweetest, which will be easy to finish, as it’s like swimming slowly through a small and refreshing pond to the other side: The Scent of Water, which our book club is reading together. It is coming to an end way too fast.
Oh, yes, there are a dozen more sitting nearby, that I plan to continue with eventually, but they are not at the moment as current as these, these rooms full of delicious crumbs that I trust are leading me always to brighter places.
In regard to my own life and reading, I don’t relate to the progression of Collins’s poem, in its hearkening back to the experiences of childhood and youth, and the mood of evening and shadow descending. I am just very thankful for all the good writers I have at my disposal, and for the lovely song that they are trying to learn and to sing.
Gladsome Lights 