Take a Ride on the Reading
Alberto Manguel is an erudite and eloquent observer of the human condition. A Reading Diary (Knopf Canada, 2004) is his one-a-month, later-in-life revisiting of his favorite classics. Each book is a point of departure for philosophical musings and philological mischief. Each spins off quotes and anecdotes that lead the reader behind and beyond the text. Here is a sampling.
Kim, Rudyard Kipling:
- If we were able to explain thoroughly the mysteries of religion, there’d be no room for faith.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes :
- The physical death of the hero is not the conclusion of the ethical argument.
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame:
- It might be useful to compile a list of things that don’t really matter. Such a list would alleviate a lot of worrying.
- The places we live in become transformed through our prejudices, whims, limited experience, through the fact that we walk one route and not another from our house to the baker’s. Or that we choose one café, one park, one grocer from the variety of sites that make up a city. In this sense, every place is imaginary.
Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
- We choose possibilities that fate has already chosen for us.
- All business is conducted between the characters and the reader; the author is absent.
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood:
- In France, the landscape is essentially one dimensional. You feel as if you could simply stretch out an arm and touch a church. In Canada, the horizon is always receding.
The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon:
- Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.
- Books have no knowledge of our existence. They come to life because we open them and turn their pages, and yet, they don’t know that we are their readers.
Manguel seeks to capture, in the essence of the novel, the essentials of life. The supreme compliment he gives his favorite writers is what, in fact, makes his own work so compelling…that they have seen clearly “something which was already there from the start”.
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