Not Read in a Day

Around the turn of the millennium, I picked up an old copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. First published in the late eighteenth century, the six-volume history had been ruthlessly abridged to 704 pages. A softcover octavo, my Viking Press edition from 1969 is flotsam of a postwar wave: the “Great Books” were printed by the millions, universities opened, English departments swelled, and from the tenderest ages we were taught that reading and writing were sacred. I now see that I grew up in the dying days of a golden age. Didn’t we all?

As years go by, it’s hard not to look at the rows of bricks that line our walls, pile up on tables, and spill over onto floors and wonder why we need “another damned, thick, square book,” as one patron quipped to Gibbon. What makes us keep them around? Some of my books are bricks in the literal sense, holding monitors up and propping windows open. But what made me carry the unread Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on cross-country moves and keep it for decades within reach of my desk next to an Odyssey (read) and an Iliad (unread)?

I am cheap, congenitally unable to buy books without calculating price divided by pages. Time and again, the two-dollar omnibus won out over slimmer fare. Only now that I know writers and publishers and have seen the labour of bringing books to print can I summon the strength to pay full price for short works. Still I love those “thrift editions” and their lofty sentiment of social uplift. But will I ever read this one?

Dear reader, I tried. Even after this assignment made reading Gibbon my literal job, I managed to always find more pressing business. Another project, dishes to wash, even taxes to file were a welcome distraction.

And I did read it. A cascade of perfectly honed sentences washed over me, page after page, into the hundreds. Centuries passed, great men and women crossed the stage, dynasties rose, then fell. Parallels with the present were everywhere: “Avarice was the reigning passion of his soul and the great principle of his administration.” Who really needs reminders that our age is one of perilous decline? I’m more interested in the fate of the unwanted tomes that long papered the walls of our lives.

In Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli says the quiet part out loud: riding your bike off in search of a new book is glorious, the outcome of that everyday voyage an afterthought. Charles Lamb’s yearning description of London’s streets full of “prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws” came to mind one cloudy Vancouver day, when I pedalled from store to store searching for an out-of-print collection by Bruce Serafin. The sun broke through the clouds when I found it.

The books I read again and again all sing the praises of small things. Unlike Gibbon, their authors choke under the great weight of saying something true. “I have always struggled to compose the simplest sentences,” writes Howard Akler in Men of Action (read eight times). “This goes beyond mere diction; even the tiniest inkling of thought must be teased out of a particular combination of sounds. Meaning usually comes hard on the heels of cadence.”

No such struggle for Gibbon, whose imperious cadence was marshalled by pacing around his room and composing his sentences aloud before committing them to writing: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

A good style in small doses, but such a surfeit of balance and proportion drowns us in a great lake of omniscience. We feel the power of abstract language to occlude individual experience, the very opposite of what my favourite books do. Sebald, Solnit, Berger, Levy, D’Ambrosio, and Pessoa all come down from the shelf when I am at a loss and lull me back into a state of calm. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (six times) so joyfully celebrates procrastination that I had to read it again to justify my own: “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” Amen.

I recommend keeping at hand every author mentioned here — except Gibbon. But the truth is that we must find our own pantheons. Wander the city and see what turns up. The search matters more than the finding. Check the Little Free Libraries: I’ll be adding to them soon. This time I really will, I swear.