While a good deal of my week of reading was spent with books I’ve read before, including Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John McPhee’s Oranges, I’ve found once again that what Nabakov said is true: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” This time Jamison revealed to me the deeper truths that can be obtained in formal experimentation; McPhee’s essay depicted in a new way for me the heroic lives of orange growers and their profound ways of being.
Though this essay about the choices poor parents have to make in feeding their children, published in this week’s Times, doesn’t have a place on my food syllabus, it certainly could: “A Hidden Cost to Giving Kids Their Vegetables,” by Caitlin Daniel.
Following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Garry Wills, whose work I’ve taught at Lang, has some thoughts in The New York Review of Books: “The Next Justice? It’s Not Up To Us.” (I also once wrote about a book by Scalia and David Foster Wallace’s favorite lexicographer, Bryan A. Garner.)
I went to a book event for Ann Neumann, and featuring Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Sheri Fink. Neumann’s new book, The Good Death, was excerpted this week in The Atlantic; the excerpt is about hospice care in prisons.
Finally, I’m also reading a book by Justine van der Leun set for release this summer, We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, A South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation. She’s written a related essay for Harper’s.
Photo of Nabakov and Véra
Scott, when you say, “This time Jamison revealed to me…; McPhee’s essay depicted in a new way for me…” it reminds me of a couple quotes I like. The first is from Clifton Fadiman who said, “When you reread a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before”. Similarly Nelson Mandela famously said, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered”.
Your post instantly reminded me of these quotes as I, too, will often come to find ‘new’ concepts or ideals when I am rereading. It’s interesting to think that you have not missed something the first time you read but, instead, are realizing more about yourself.
I can imagine this must be especially true for you when you teach the same essays year after year and continually get new feedback and different ways to look at them.
I’m increasingly fascinated by this idea, Mollie, that there’s a strange synergy between the work and the changed person experiencing the work. What’s strangest of all is that an encounter with the work itself changes the individual, and even an immediate re-rereading (or re-listening, re-viewing) will be different than the original one.
And it’s true that I come to the essays and books I re-teach a new person each time, and that each group of students (and often, an individual student) opens the work up to me anew. It’s particularly important to me, though, also to bring to classes essays and books I’ve only ever read on my own, to see how my understanding can be expanded based on a first group discussion. Yes, central to my life of reading includes continual feedback from the work and from the people I talk about it with.