Reverential Reading

Lots of reading before during the pandemic......

Last December, I started to get re-interested in Camus so I read The Plague.

Wow.

In January, I borrowed Love in the Time of Cholera.

Then it all got real.

The library is closed.

I've still got Love in the Time of Cholera. It's in my living room, setting next to my book Full Filler which came out at almost the exact moment that the virus arrived.

I've had Love in the Time of Cholera since this whole damned thing began and there's no sign that I'll need to return it soon.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Trump stuff like Jon Karl's Front Row at the Trump Show and just about everything else I can get my hands on about the extraverted narcissist who's blundering his way through this crisis with daily displays of blaming, self adulation, disinfection fantasies, alternate facts, attacks on science and the press etc. I'm trying hard to understand.

Then, I switched over to Woody Allen's auto Apropos of Nothing which I enjoyed immensely. Nice to hear Woddy's side of the story in the midst of the character assasination that overwhelms him and tarnishes his past accomplishments.

So with my mind fully filled with the "reality" of the times. I decided to jump back into literature to see if I could decongest my intellect. I arrived once again at Dosteovsky.

When I'm reading Dosteovsky or Joyce or Tolstoy or Turgenev or Marquez, I tend to slip into what I call reverential reading...especially with the Russians. I keep wondering if I'm a good enough reader to stay with them and I'm always expecting to get lost within the brilliance and the different variations of "oviches" that sometimes make it difficult to follow which character is saying/doing what. What peasant is being tied to the back of a bear and tossed into the swimming pool. I've got to pay special attention and apply what I call reverential reading.

In other words, I'm expecting to get kicked out of the book at any second, thrwon into the pool with the bear and the peasant.

All the way through War and Peace for example, I was ready to be expelled until I reached the end and hadn't been kicked out yet. That's when I realized what a tremednous book I had read and how proud I was to have gone the distance.

Earlier, I had the same approach and reaction to reading Crime and Punishment.

So here I am again, immersed in Dosty's The Idiot....still expecting to get kicked out and amazed that I'm following it so closely and loving the hell out of it. What an antidote for Trump!

After I finish The Idiot, if I don't get kicked out.....I'm going back to Love in the Time of Cholera and revere that reading experience. I'm going to wait until the library schedules its reopening and then I'm going to devour Marquez which I've done before when I spent A Hundred Years in Solitude.

So my advice to myself which I can pass on to y'all without hpocrisy is to occasionally read with reverence, understand why the great Masterpieces of language are what they are, savor them with respect. They's friendlier than you might think.

Is there a title that you've always said you're going to get around to somedy but were always a little afraid to begin? Now's the time to start and don't be surprised if you go the distance. Literature does not aim to "kick us out" rather to bring us in communion with timeless, universal humanity at its most articulate.