In Caroline Fraser’s nonfiction book Murderland, there are charts and metrics, there are photographs, and I wondered about how many other investigators and resources that Fraser must have pulled into her quest in order to develop this vast canvas—the very project she describes in this book’s opening, the effort to pull a thread of yarn from one tragedy to the next, as in a detective’s crime scene map.
George Dardess’s recent post, “Imagining Mutability,” prompted me to turn to other poems about mutability. That’s one of the rewards of a good close reading: it begins a dialogue and guides us from one literary work to others. I remembered Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Mutability,” included in 1914 and Other Poems, published in May 1915, a month after he passed away from blood poisoning aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
Nonetheless, there are still the hours to stare down. To care for someone sick, even when joyfully, is to watch the painful inching forward of time, just as it is to watch the day fall forward on a Sabbath without electronic amusements. And to bear the breadth of literature can be exacting, but a labor that ultimately satisfies.
Along with Richard Wright, many other African American writers have spoken about the awakening they received from books. Ralph Ellison recalled that he “read voraciously,” that “the act of reading” was “an apprenticeship in freedom.” James Baldwin read “every single book I could get my hands on.… Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”
Nearby on my desk is a thick textbook, 10 inches high, 7½ inches wide, battered, edges stained from sweat and dirt, with the word LITERATURE in white letters on the faded brownish-orange cover. Just above this word, in smaller letters, is the phrase “An Approach” to. The book’s full title, AN APPROACH TO LITERATURE, is printed horizontally in white block caps on the binding, a dark gray-green color that curls an inch onto the front and back.
The genteel word “readers” is inadequate for the condition in which we self-declared readers find ourselves. “Consumers,” on the other hand, seems to me a better fit for the current moment. That word has become something of a catch-all, used ruefully to term any group, from college students to church members, who act entitled to receive something without any effort.
On the front cover, against a mostly red background, was the white image of a seamed baseball, with the words “The Babe Ruth Story” inscribed on it. In a black box underneath it: “By Babe Ruth as Told to Bob Considine.” To the left, in vertical layout, were four small black and white photographs, showing in sequence the Babe’s mighty swing.
Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking them.
In this post, I’d like to share with you the story of my career as a close reader. I wonder whether your experience is anything like it. I wonder, too, whether this kind of career is possible today, in an era dominated by social media and full of suspicion and doubt about the value of the humanities.
My bedside dresser is a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. That’s a photo of it you see here. Too many books piled in every direction, about to fall over. My wife Peggy counts them from time to time, calling out the growing number so that I can’t fail to hear it. She refuses to straighten the piles herself, much as she’d like to. She wants me to do it myself.