Life is full of disappointments large and small. There are illnesses, financial troubles, family worries, political disasters and the knowledge, increasingly difficult to avoid as one grows older, that time moves in only one direction. Then there are the tiny irritations that should mean almost nothing but somehow manage to darken an entire afternoon: the missing key, the broken appliance, the bill that should never have arrived, the computer that refuses to cooperate or the object that was definitely sitting on the table five minutes ago and has apparently vanished from the universe. Theodore Dalrymple begins a delightful recent essay with precisely such an experience. Having lost the key to his post-box somewhere along the 500-yard track between it and his house, he repeatedly searches for it and finds himself absurdly disheartened by something that is, objectively speaking, a trivial inconvenience. Yet during his unsuccessful search he discovers an ammonite fossil, an object perhaps tens of millions of years old, and suddenly his missing key and his frustration acquire a rather different scale.
There is something wonderfully human about this. We know perfectly well that our minor troubles are minor, but knowing it does not necessarily stop them annoying us. A man can contemplate geological time in the morning and still curse a missing key in the afternoon. Dalrymple eventually does what lifelong readers have always done when the world becomes tiresome: he retreats to his library and begins leafing through books. There he encounters another melancholy thought. Perhaps he himself is becoming rather like his ammonite, because the habit that has given him so much pleasure throughout his life is apparently declining. He cites a report claiming that children's reading has fallen dramatically since 2016 and wonders whether the bibliomane, the person for whom books are almost a way of life, is becoming an endangered species.
Perhaps he is right about the direction of modern culture. We inhabit the age of the smartphone, TikTok, YouTube, streaming entertainment and the permanently interrupted attention span. A book makes an unfashionable demand upon its reader. It asks us to sit still. It asks for sustained attention. It does not flash another video onto the page after fifteen seconds because an algorithm has detected that our concentration is wandering. There are no notifications in the margin announcing that somebody we barely know has uploaded a photograph of lunch. A book waits patiently until we are prepared to enter its world, and perhaps that patience is precisely why reading can still provide something that our more frantic forms of entertainment cannot.
For all the hardships of life, there remain the consolations of a good book. On a cold winter evening there are few simpler pleasures than sitting beside the fire with a book, listening to the rain or wind outside while following another person's thoughts across the page. In summer the same pleasure can be carried beneath the shade of a favourite tree, with a chair, something cold to drink and an afternoon temporarily liberated from the demands of the world. No airport is required, no hotel reservation needs to be made and there is no admission charge once the book is yours. You can travel to ancient Rome, Victorian London, Tolkien's Middle-earth or a galaxy that has never existed without moving more than a few metres from the kettle.
It is also one of the pleasures of life that remains remarkably inexpensive. This is worth remembering in an age when almost every leisure activity seems to have acquired subscriptions, service charges and escalating prices. A second-hand book can still cost only a few dollars. Libraries will lend books for nothing. The book bought twenty years ago asks for no renewal fee before allowing its owner to read it again. It does not announce that the licence has expired, withdraw itself because a streaming agreement has changed, or demand that its reader accept revised terms and conditions. A battered old volume pulled from a shelf remains willing to provide exactly the same service it provided decades earlier.
Indeed, an old book can become something more than its contents. Open a volume you first read thirty or forty years ago and you may encounter your younger self in its pages. There is the sentence you underlined, the folded corner, the faded receipt used as a bookmark or perhaps a pencilled observation whose importance you can no longer understand. The book has become a small archaeological site containing fragments of your own past. You remember where you lived when you first read it, what concerned you then and perhaps people who were alive when you bought it but are no longer here. Rereading therefore produces the strange experience of encountering two authors simultaneously: the person who wrote the book and the person you were when you first read it.
Dalrymple observes that retirement has allowed him to live increasingly through books and that accumulated experience changes what books can mean. This is one of the compensations of ageing that receives too little attention. A book read at twenty is not necessarily the same book when read at sixty or seventy. The words have remained unchanged, but the reader has not. A novel about marriage means one thing before marriage and another after decades of family life. A book about war looks different after one has watched wars begin and end. History changes when events remembered as yesterday's news have themselves become history. The great books possess the peculiar capacity to wait for us to acquire enough life to understand passages we once passed over without noticing.
Reading does not automatically make anyone virtuous, and Dalrymple is right to reject that comforting conceit. A person who has read a thousand books is not necessarily morally superior to somebody who has read a hundred, and history contains plenty of highly educated scoundrels. Bad books can mislead just as good books can illuminate. Yet Dalrymple makes another observation that rings true: he cannot remember reading a book during the past decade from which he learned absolutely nothing. Even a mediocre book tells us something, if only about the assumptions of the person who wrote it or the age that produced it.
That accumulation matters. Reading gives us access to lives we could never live ourselves. No individual can personally experience the fall of Rome, sail with Captain Cook, debate with Socrates, fight at Waterloo, walk through Dickens's London and witness the great scientific disputes of the twentieth century. Our biological lives are narrow. We occupy one body, one historical period and a tiny portion of the Earth's surface. Books allow the mind partially to escape those limitations. Through them the dead continue speaking, distant cultures become imaginable and ideas formulated centuries ago can suddenly illuminate a problem encountered this morning.
There is another consolation that becomes increasingly valuable as life becomes difficult. A book does not necessarily solve our troubles, but it can put them into perspective. Dalrymple's ammonite does this through geological time, while literature does it through the accumulated experience of other human beings. Whatever grief, disappointment, humiliation or fear troubles us, somebody somewhere has probably experienced something resembling it and written about it. We discover that our private catastrophe is part of the ancient repertoire of human existence. That does not make suffering disappear, but there can be comfort in discovering that we are not the first people to pass along a difficult road.
Books also permit retreat without complete escape. There are moments when the best response to the noise of politics, media and daily argument is simply to withdraw for an hour. The world will continue producing crises without our supervision. Politicians will continue talking, commentators will continue commenting and social media will manufacture another outrage before breakfast. Sitting beneath a tree with a novel will not solve these problems, but neither will spending another hour scrolling through them. Sometimes preserving one's sanity requires recognising that attention is a finite resource and refusing to surrender all of it to the demands of the present moment.
Perhaps serious readers really are becoming cultural fossils. The evidence Dalrymple cites about declining reading is certainly depressing, and the technological pressures working against sustained attention are obvious. Yet predictions of the death of books have been made before, and the book possesses qualities that are surprisingly difficult to replace. It is portable, durable, inexpensive and requires neither electricity nor an internet connection. It can survive decades on a shelf and return instantly to life when opened. Most importantly, it provides that increasingly rare commodity: an extended encounter with another mind without an algorithm continually interrupting the conversation.
There will always be hardships in life, and no library can abolish them. The key will still be lost, the bill will still arrive, the body will grow older and the world will continue behaving in ways that disappoint us. Yet human beings have accumulated an extraordinary storehouse of consolation within books, available to almost anyone for very little money. Perhaps that is something worth defending simply because it is pleasurable. Not every good thing needs to justify itself through productivity, educational outcomes or measurable improvements in cognitive performance.
So with winter still here, put another log on the fire and take down an old favourite from the shelf. When summer returns, find the shade of a familiar tree and take a book with you. For a few dollars, or for nothing at all from the local library, one can spend an afternoon in the company of Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien, Dostoevsky or almost anyone else whose thoughts have survived upon the printed page. In an increasingly expensive, hurried and electronically distracted world, that remains one of civilisation's simplest luxuries, and one of life's most enduring consolations.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/on-the-death-and-consolations-of-reading/