Reading and Writing and...

There are certain people who especially love books and reading and learning of all sorts, and they would especially like it were we to grace them with a label as generous as "bibliophile", but we'll avoid such an abundance of expression at the moment so as to avoid unduly praising that which is too commonly praised in either the spirit of egotism or in a sadly-acceptable appeal to the norms of the status quo. Here, we wish to discuss those who love reading and their experience of reading, in an attempt to discover the meaning of the essence of the being of a book, through the experiences of those who particularly enjoy reading them.

Whenever a reader may first begin to read, and whatever he may start with, he will eventually-invariably come to a point where he thinks to himself the simple and too-simple thought: "This is good." In an implicit acknowledgment of the basic cruelty of the universe, it is at this inconvenient point, when the reader lacks any sort of self-scrutiny or -awareness, that all the critical questions become answered, even before they may be properly asked. But, for us, situated much later than this rhetorically imagined first-reading and first-valuation of reading, we may ask several strange questions. The innocent reader will surely have no idea how to adequately answer our questions (which he has, of course, already and unknowingly inadvertently answered), and so he inevitably answers poorly, aiming to please the questioner rather than drive home some vaguely ethereal notion of the real truth of the matter. So we cannot trust his answers (which are of course our own).

And so we eventually come back to the present, to the advent of the opening of a space adequate for questioning. What is quality when it comes to a book; what constitutes the value of a book? Moreover, what constitutes a "book" and the being of a book? Oddly, our minds immediately fall upon and dwell with the first question, the question of quality, rather than looking deeply into the second, less obviously interesting question of what constitutes the essence of the book's "being". But this is to be expected. While the first question conjures thoughts of a dandy philosophical adventure traversing the bold worlds of aesthetics and ethics in a good and honorable quest to slay that ever-elusive dragon that is the Good-in-Itself, the latter question falls by the wayside in that it does not seem to hold any promise for gold or conquest or glory; it is not a hero's quest but rather a trite and too-ordinary errand. After all, what is a book but a book? Who cares about what a book is? A book is a book - and there is not much more you can say than that.

Nevertheless, it is precisely this latter question that gives the former one its weight and potential for glory. After all, the value of a book may be gauged only against some sort of "Platonic Ideal" of its being-a-book - which is to say, a book is only good insofar as it resembles the singular and ideal Book which is not merely an instance or example of book-ness, but rather the quintessential perfection of a book's basic being.

And so, lengthy preamble aside, what constitutes the essential being of a book, by which we are to gauge the value of all books? Unfortunate as we are, we do not live in Plato's time or times when Plato was taken more seriously than today, and so we are forced not to take his notion of the Form of something quite literally, but rather to consider it within a quasi-Kantian hierarchy of basic human subjectivity. Which is to say, we each of us have different ideas as to what the ideal book is, and these ideas do not perfectly coincide into a single Platonic Ideal; and so we must deconstruct our own subjectivity, and in all hopes, with it the subjectivity of all other judging and value-giving human beings. Which is to say, we shall look back at the time when we were so careless as to think that we knew what we meant, so careless indeed that we unintentionally gave birth to meaning in the things we said - with the additional conflating self-deception that those meanings were inherent to the things we were talking about, and not instead fundamentally subsisting in ourselves.

We were young, we were naive, and we blessed books with the notion of goodness. We are now older, wiser, but still stuck thinking that there are some books better than others. This does seem to be an unavoidably inevitable valuation, discriminating between one sort of thing and another, divvying up reality according to our perceptual appraisals of value... and so we must ask ourselves, what were we thinking when we weren't thinking? If we can be that naive again, can we recall what made us think that certain books were good, that is to say, that somehow they resembled the perfection of being a book? And then, if we are so lucky to get that far, may we successfully invert our perspective and our inquiry so as to reach forward rather than back, toward the future rather than the past, away from reading and toward the reciprocal motion that is, of course, writing?

Let us avoid, right from the start, the sort of dull and overdone discussions of subjectivity that address nothing but the relativity of personal pleasures. It is clear that everyone likes what they like, but we are here discussing philosophy, not psychology, and it would be foolish for us to fancy ourselves psychoanalysts and embark on a lengthy and trivial examination of pleasure. I know that some people like reading some things, while other people like reading others, and for different reasons always. That doesn't interest me. What interests me is the possibility that there is a tendency, if not perhaps even a universality, that flows through all ideas of what a good book is, uniting to form a collectively-subconscious understanding of the fundamental being of a book.

And it does occur to me that there is just such an underlying tendency, although it is not universally present in all instances. A book is always a condensation; more words go into it than come out of it. That is to say, I have a thousand thoughts before I write a single sentence, and somehow I, as the author, have considered the alternatives and set upon the proper sentence for this particular place in the book; and that this process happens over and over until the work is complete. And once it is complete, it is finished. The book stands, for all time, as it is.

It is clear to me that this near-universality is a singular misunderstanding regarding what the basic essence of a book is. A book is supposed to be timeless; that is to say, it stands outside of time despite the fact that it is a product of time. The book is written, and it is finished. It is a "work", and it stands complete. This is how we read and think of books. Although a book may burn or be forgotten, and fall forever from the bookshelves of eternal remembrance, it still stands and subsists in a singular removal from time's flow. And when we are reading a book and consider it to be especially good, it is because this book is somehow more eternal than the rest. How we evaluate this eternality, and what we consider to be a quality that makes a book "good enough" to stand outside of time, is not our concern.

But we said, and maintain, that this is a misunderstanding. Books are created in time, and the goodness of a book lies not insofar as it stands outside of time, but precisely insofar as it stands within time, and within the timeliness of time. It is with this in mind that we say that we should not think of works as stalwart pinnacles that erupt, removed from the course of time, existing without beginning or end, but principally as malleable works of creation, that can be cut and skewered and re-mended a thousand times and still exist just as surely as they did when they existed in a somehow more "virgin" state. For there is no innocent virginity for such a thing as a book - books are products of the worst violence and the most depraved ideological molestations and lexical rapes. There is no purity in a book - the book is an abomination - and the perfection of a book lies exactly insofar as the book presents and represents an extensive and penetrating mockery of existence itself. For this is precisely how the writer gave rise to his work - and who are we to question the originary spirit of creation?