Here — or elsewhere?

My friend Mrs. Beaver quoted this reflection on reading. It’s quoted by Lauren Winner in Girl Meets God, in a section about her experience giving up reading for Lent one year. The speaker she quotes is Sven Birkerts:

To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.

My first reaction was that I didn’t like the idea of “positing an elsewhere and setting off for it.” But after some discussion with Mrs. Beaver, I agree with her that it’s really the part about how an imaginative voyage into a book is “a comment of sorts about the place one has left” that I take exception to.

I thought of a C.S. Lewis statement that reflects a perspective similar in some ways, different in others. It’s interesting to compare the two:

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Both of them seem to agree that our private experience of life is incomplete, and books (among other things) can add to it. But reading isn’t always escapist. What I like about Lewis’s statement is that it captures something I love about reading: I’m always “confined” within my own mind and life, but virtually anything I read can “irrigate” how I experience it. Whatever I’m reading will be like a stained glass window that colors everything in my “room.” I’ll notice things I never would notice if I weren’t reading a given book at a given moment.

But I also got thinking about reading things via computer. I’ve noticed that unlike books, which come to me where I am and “add to my reality,” cyberspace seems to take me — my consciousness — away from reality.  I use the internet to blog and to find information, yet I rarely turn from the computer with the kind of satisfaction and reflectiveness I feel when I turn from a book. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the placelessness of cyberspace. Everything seems more detached.

I notice too that I react differently when interrupted online than I do when interrupted while reading a book. If I’m reading a book, I’ll note where I am on the page and look up at my daughters when they come talking towards me. If I’m online, my eyes often want to stay attached to the screen — as if it will vanish if I look away for a moment.

I looked for the original source of Birkert’s quote online, but without success. I did however find this extremely thoughtful and worthwhile — and maybe prophetic — article of his from 1996. It’s well worth reading. For my purposes here I’ll just pull out these sentences toward the end:

And as we move remorselessly forward, adapting ourselves to speed, simultaneity, surfaces, and stresses, the reading act will become not only more difficult, but more important as well. The time of reading, the “deep time” that I have written about elsewhere — that is, in essence, absorbed experiential time wherein we are utterly unaware of the clockface or the clicking of digits — will become one of the surest paths back. Not so much to a specific past, but to the more reflective and contained selves we will realize we cannot bear to lose touch with. Reading will thus become an act of restoration, and the time experience of reading — the creation of that absorption — will become our fondest aspiration.

Interesting, isn’t it, that book-reading and cyberspace both create a sense of timelessness. But for some reason, when I close a book, I have a sense of time used; when I close the laptop, I have a sense of time lost. Not sure why. But it’s enough to convince me to take a step back from blogging for awhile. Not to quit altogether. Just to take a step back. Maybe it’s for Lent — late. Why not? Fasts are for any season.