Wednesday afternoon, I tried to identify the oldest object in my life. There’s the coffee thermos I’ve owned for 27 years. I have T-shirts that are two decades’ tattered. My car is 16, my puffy jacket is patched with duct tape. Recently, my dad’s cousin shipped me one of my grandfather’s service shirts from the Navy, with his name (also my name) embroidered inside the collar.
But I wonder if the oldest, most meaningful thing isn’t an object so much as a skill.
This week my wife and I purged our bookshelves. We own too many books, we continue to acquire too many books, and we don’t live in a giant place. About two-hundred got sold to a local shop. The rest went to the neighborhood public library. Packing them up, I remembered reading one of them in a dreary pub in England, another on a South African train. I remembered the touch a certain book made on my mind.
I’ve loved books forever, but I think I love reading more. It’s addictive, the hypnosis, the experience when trance takes hold and there’s no more time. A book is fragile, reading is not. It’s unaccompanied but sociable. Somehow it never gets old. Maybe it’s why I don’t fear anything so much as Alzheimer’s – the inability to retain information, to hold my mind.
Take away tennis, take away television, take away sunsets and tequila, but reading? Reading is the oldest way I know myself to be.
(A note I wrote to myself Thursday night: “Reading is pasta carbonara.” I have no idea what I meant, but it feels right.)
There’s a Marcel Proust essay called “On Reading,” in which he writes “reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.” Somehow, reading that yesterday morning, my thoughts went to the divine. The divine is a concept I don’t have much attachment to. The idea of such an outside perspective, gazing upon others, standing outside time – I mean, reading is kinda that, but with immediacy and heat: immediacy enough to collapse distance, and heat enough to feel alive. I’ve always thought that whatever’s happening at the midpoint between a text and my mind, the intersection practically hums.
Reading is swimming. Reading leads to inner rooms. What I call life, to be alive, to be a person in the world with other people, is basically reading all the time.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters, 3+ things to love:
Detailed methods on how to receive less junk mail at home
How to visualize time. Also, the time I stalked Martin Amis
A new film for mountain lovers, one of the best old films for mountain lovers, and some surprises from the week online
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a monthly longer piece sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.