A Reading Realization
At some point this weekend, smack in the middle of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods, I got very excited by the need to expand upon a sort of personal truth.1 I’ve long been aware that if I’m not reading, my writing suffers. Easy enough. But Calasso’s discussion of the way in which Stéphane Mallarmé changed poetry and even our thinking about what literature is made me also realize explicitly that if I’m not reading, I’m also not thinking, not fully in touch with the world, maybe—and this is a big maudlin stretch, I know—not fully alive.
I’m not sure any specific aspect of Calasso’s book instigated this realization, as if there’d been an italicized assertion somewhere in the text insisting that if you ain’t readin’, then you ain’t livin’.2 But something snapped while being confronted with Mallermé’s assertion that “verse is everything, to those who write.”3 To my mind, the poet, more or less bringing prose into the realm of poetry (or vice versa), was acknowledging the weird need writers have, whether poets or not, just to write, and to write well, to let language “celebrate itself:”4 to do more than just get a fact out there, or make a convincing case about a certain matter. For those lucky unfortunates like yours truly, regardless of the form or genre you call your own, there’s the additional submission to the call of “rhythm in language,” which means “prose [as something distinct from poetry] doesn’t exist; there is the alphabet and then there is verse…. Every time there is a strain toward style, there is versification.”5
Quite a lot of Calasso’s book deals with that often-discussed writerly compulsion that can’t possibly be explained via logic, game theory, economic reasoning, what have you—a state of being that can really best be described, or which feels like, some other power strong-arming you into an activity or practice you’d give anything to get away from. At first, you think Calasso will treat you to a beautifully written historical account of how the (especially) Greek and Hindu gods have appeared over time in literature; instead or/and in addition, he winds up asserting that writers are to be thanked for “sneaking the gods… back into the world."6 Or rather, he redefines for us what literature means and is trying to do, getting at it by describing “'absolute literature.' ‘Literature’ because it is a knowledge that claims to be accessible only and exclusively by way of literary composition; ‘absolute’ because it is a knowledge that one assimilates while in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything; and at the same time it is something absolutum; unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility.”7 People like me, all those desk-drawer novelists and inveterate diarists and letter writers, can’t seem to shake this need to write, even when it drives you right to the edge of nuttiness and has you wondering why you can’t just be like other people and enjoy spending your free time binge-watching the latest hit. Well, there you go: because, perhaps, we’re trying to get in touch with some absolute—and Netflix and TikTok, hellbent on dishing up viewer numbers, definitely aren’t its source, and won’t get you any closer to it.
This view of literature and writing makes sense, when you consider I spent a whole graduate career studying religions—essentially the way many a culture and people were seeking an absolute. That endeavor ended up not being what I was after8—but neither before, during, nor after that interlude was I able to stop writing or reading. And it was also in part because the realities of that time period and the sort of professional training it entailed took me away from literature’s, as opposed to professional academia’s, desire and attempt to “draw in no less than everything”—that it shut me out of the wide reading and conversation that as mentioned at the start of this humble essay kept me engaged with life—that I felt myself withering and feeling dull.
And so something in (maybe the whole of) Calasso’s book brought out the connection I always knew was there, even if I hadn’t explicitly stated it to myself. There are unsurprisingly days, sometimes a few in a row, when work projects, errands, obligations, etc., etc., appropriate so many of my waking hours that by the time I have a second to myself, I’m too tired to do the one thing I want more than anything else to do: jump into the thoughts someone else has offered up for consideration. I might try to open a book—but that’s only to wake up a few hours later with a drooled-on paper cut on my face and my note-taking pen having scrawled a fat line on a pillow case, defeated in my attempt to find some blip of meaning in a day otherwise spent serving more or less the interests of what Mallarmé might have included in the aims of “posters and the advertising page of the newspapers.”9 I need that proof of others’ search for the (literary) absolute to know I’m not alone, not only in my pained relationship with writing, but also and especially in my stubborn need to find something more worth my time and energy and care than headlines and memes and ads would have us adopt as our true concerns.
I need this sort of conversation, then, to feel human. And although I initially started to wonder whether that need was connected in an unhealthy/ier way to my possession of books—I’m not the only person I know who, every time she moved, would reread Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library”10—I ended up discarding that particular worry. As long as there are libraries, friends who’ll share their books, and, though I have trouble reading on screens, access to the internet—and as long as I’m able to find there work that’s also engaged in that absolute pursuit, and as long as I have the time and space to sit with it—that addiction to what really amounts to a search with no possible end need not foster subsidiary addictions.
There’s more to all of this than I have space to consider right now—but let’s just say that after a very busy week, a day spent with a dead author and all the other dead authors he considered brought everything wonderfully back to life.
The cup featured above in the picture is described by Calasso as a great depiction of the relationship between the gods and literature: Orpheus's severed head, still singing as Apollo directs the poet struggling to get it all down. See Calasso, 191–93.
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You can subscribe as well via RSS feed.1. Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 2001).↩
2. Apologies to Tommy Collins and everyone, including George Strait, who's ever sung his "If You Ain't Lovin' (You Ain't Livin').↩
3. Calasso, quoting from Mallarmé’s “La musique et les lettres,” 126. ↩
4. Calasso, quoting Gottfried Benn’s Briefe, 182. ↩
5. Calasso, quoting from Mallarmé’s “Sur l’évolution littéraire,” 129.↩
6. Calasso, 169.↩
7. Calasso, 170–71. Emphasis in original.↩
8. But still totally worthwhile; although the subject matter no longer engages me, it’d be an outright crime to claim that the people and ideas I met along the way, and the critical thinking skills the experience developed, amounted to a waste of time and money, as the refrain “How’re you gonna get a job with that?” would have it.↩
9. Calasso, quoting from Mallarmé’s “Sur l’évolution littéraire,” 129.↩
10. Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 59–67.↩