Reading is falling in love.
So why does it surprise people that one who reads as widely and deeply as myself doesn’t have more favourite books? A favourite book is a lover, a soul mate, a companion of the heart. You don’t fall in love with everyone you date. Love is reserved for that rare electric occurrence in which one perceives themselves in the eyes, mind, heart, speech, and soul of another.
Love begins in many different ways, its possible expressions like stars in a constellation, or moves on a chess board. Sometimes your heart’s aflutter from the start. You know – This. Is. The. One. But sometimes that feeling’s mistaken. You think you’re falling in love until you see their true colours. Many times you don’t see true colours precisely because you’re in love.
But what’s love anyway?
Puppy love fades. And books that enraptured us at eighteen don’t even incite a tingle a decade later.
Then there are the books that you love maturely – deeply, robustly, like family. If you encounter them too soon, you won’t be right for one another. You’ve got some growing up to do.
But books, very often unlike people, will wait for you.
They’ll be there when you’re ready, perfect marriage and all.
Sometimes we experience true tragedy in the form of stunted awe of a book, but we know we’re three years, ten years, twenty-four years, fifty years too early. Sometimes we think we’re ready when we’re not. Reading the great books is falling in love with someone older than you, but on a more magnificent scale.
Most of the time, it’s not a certain number of years that need to pass, nor a certain amount of milestones, but rather certain paradigms need to shift into place. We need to experience death. Grief that grips us to our very marrow. Love scorned, love returned, love idled, love ruined, and love burnt upon a pyre for a god you don’t believe in. And, speaking of God, we must fall in and out of different theisms, both religious and political. All this preparation for THE ONE.
I first read King Lear aged sixteen.
I felt the levity of the work, and thus frustration and not comprehending its full power (I doubt I ever will). Mr Dearmer was passionate about Lear. And he jumped up and down in excitement when I started a debate that left the rest of the class in silence about the panoply of gods in an uncaring universe, and how we need to have bad in order to have good. “Yes! Yes!” He said. “Come on! More! More!” But no more would come. My chest was heavy, a laboured breath escaped my soul.
I’ve read King Lear perhaps twenty times now. Reading Lear every year means I come closer to being able to express in ineffable.
I threw Dylan Thomas across the room aged fourteen.
I read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer at the same age, and thought I understood them, but returning to both of them after actually living I’m convinced my adolescent self hadn’t the slightest clue about what he was reading.
I fell in love with Jack Kerouac aged fifteen thanks to On the Road and Dharma Bums. I pursued that love at university, and one year out of that institution I found the love was quite shallow and misguided.
Somewhat similar story when it comes to Joseph Conrad. I read Heart of Darkness in one sitting aged sixteen, and couldn’t breathe for days. I followed that love to university, and read everything Conrad produced, but all it did was make me miserable.
There’s something depressing about Conrad.
To this day, I’m hesitant to return to him, my dark abusive love.
I’m glad I first came to Aristotle seriously in my late twenties. My love of Nietzsche only increased when I understood him (as opposed to Conrad), but would I have been able to say the same about Aristotle?
What I do know is that I read Plato aged fourteen, returned to him again last year, and have decided I thoroughly detest him. Like Freud. When you’re fourteen, Freud is amazing, eye-opening, life-changing. Read him a decade later and you see him for what he is: a sick, thoroughly misguided psycho-quack (who happened to hit on a few credible theories among a body of largely discredited work).
But after Freud, you find Jung – so I must thank Sigmund for that gift. Carl Jung is like Viktor Frankl to me. Both are life-saving angels, saintly men who saved my life from beyond the grave.
There was a time in my life where I no longer wanted to live, and Jung helped me through.
I think of the poets. Sure, I’ve always loved Keats. Time and experience has only deepened that love. But Rilke and Rumi would have been lost on my teenage eyes. Thank God I only just recently discovered them – or did they discover me?
I think of the great works of gothic fiction. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde was boring to me as a young man. But as a man approaching thirty, it’s the most ever-relevant piece of soul-examination I’ve ever experienced. Shelley’s Frankenstein too was dismissed by me in my younger years. But reading it in my twenties made tears run down my cheeks. And Stoker’s Dracula was instrumental in my creative development aged twelve, but what will happen when I return to it again this year?
Great Expectations became my favourite book aged sixteen. But rereading it today, I wonder how I could have called it my favourite when I gained not one-percent of the appreciation I have today.
But isn’t that like one who marries young and finds themselves, luckily, perhaps against all odds, falling deeper and deeper in love every day since? You see that with adorable old couples, don’t you? They talk about how they’re happier than the day they met. And it’s like that with some books.