Reading to Forget

In a little over a week I will begin an annual project I quite look forward to: my January re-reading of the Regency / Georgian social comic* novels of Georgette Heyer. I do a lot of re-reading: at least once a year I re-read one or more of Barbara Tuchman's histories (usually The Proud Tower), and in 2018 I've also been re-reading Pratchett.

Handheld folding spectacles (from
Wikimedia Commons)

One thing about re-reading has always surprised me, and at times made me feel more than a little inadequate: even with only a twelvemonth between readings, I often find myself unfamiliar with the plots of Heyer's novels. For a long time I thought there was just something wrong with the way I read.

Then, a couple of months ago, I read something that cheered me up a little, or at least made me feel a bit better about the way I read. In an essay by Joseph Epstein (no idea who this is†, and no doubt this reflects very poorly on me) I came across the following (concerning the point of a reading life—the point rather than the goal, because according to Epstein the reading life can have no goal):

Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.”

Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.”

As I put it elsewhere some years ago, I read for the pleasures of style and in the hope of “laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness,” and, like Montaigne, on lucky days perhaps to pick up a touch of wisdom along the way.

That is, I realized the instant I read it, precisely the way I read, and why. And now I feel much better about the fact of my not retaining huge amounts of what I’ve read. Really, how could I? I’m reading a couple hundred books a year—by a conservative estimate—and if I retained even a tithe of all that material my brain would probably burst. What I hope I retain is general ideas from all those books, plus the occasional fragment of something exceptional, the revival from time to time of which will please or amuse me.

*She is generally called a romance or historical romance novelist, but I would argue that while male-female relations play a large part in these novels, and they all have happy endings in which the heroine and hero are united, the social comedy is what really matters. Put it another way: "male-female relations play a large part in these novels, and they all have happy endings..." also describes the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Because he was a gent, nobody ever calls Plum a romance novelist.

†Here he is. I still know pretty much nothing about him.