THE IMPORTANCE OF READING BOOKS IN A TIME OF CRISIS
In a time of crisis, it is often difficult to know what to do. Should I put the television on? I could take out the rubbish? The washing machine needs to run. What about the radio? I must clear the coffee table. What about those work emails that I hadn’t finished?
When your mind is trying to come to terms with catastrophe it often struggles to engage in normal activities. It flits from one possibility to the next without coming to a conclusion. What I want to support in these lines is the importance of reading as a balm for troubled spirits, a relaxant to help us get back to day to day life. An hour or so of reading can sooth the mind and leave it in a much healthier position to work effectively and complete household chores.
The first advantage of reading lies in its capacity to generate empathy. The greatest review that a novel can receive says: “I was there. I was really in the shoes of the characters. As I turned the pages, I felt the chilly wind on my brow and saw the harp-shaped mountains in the distance! I wasn’t me anymore. She was me. I was her in Siberia, following the hunters as they stalked wild boar!” Being someone else for an hour or so is fabulous distraction. It distances us from our travails, refreshes our minds.
The second benefit of reading comes in its magical capacity to send us to outer space. Especially in poetry, perhaps, reading can function as a kaleidoscope. It fragments our normal way of thinking and fills the crevices with rocket fuel. It is difficult to explain how this happens. It might just be enough to say that certain lines of poetry have a mysterious power. My late father once gave me a copy of T. S. Eliot’s collected poems and in the flyleaf he quoted the line, “And in short, I was afraid” from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Sometimes when I recall this line I get a tingling feeling; there are little sparks by my temples and if I’m outside and stare at the sky, the clouds configure into funny patterns: I might see the shape of an ox or a lone figure flying a windsurf. That reading can cause out-of-body experiences helps. After we have been lifted out of our seats by our collars and fired towards the moon by a poem, we eventually come back down to the ground and when we do we are abler to put our earthly concerns in perspective. Whatever worldly matters worry us the vastness of the universe, and the shadowy world of the divine, outstrips them by a hundredfold.
The third and last benefit centres on the very act of reading. Opening a book and following words as they trail along and then down the page is meditative and, in much the same way as a session of yoga, balances your mind. The understatedness of black text on a white page is re-assuring. Text is motionless, silent and consistent. As your eyes move from one word to the next in quiet acceptance, they allow the rest of your body to take some time off. Then you have the gentle, old fashioned sound of two pieces of paper scraping together as your thumb and index finger turn the page. Books have been read for thousands of years. There is nothing high-tech about them. They have great strength but don’t artificially stimulate. They aren’t showy. They are earthy. They stretch our minds and slowly unwind tension.
Newspaper headlines, Whatsapp messages, Facebook, Instagram: they all want our attention. But almost everybody has a bookshelf. It just might be our best sanctuary as the world gets more and more deeply tangled in an RNA virus.