Dear bibliopathologist,
on January 13, I took stock of two years of pandemic reading. In twenty-four months I have read 62 novels, or an average of about 2.5 per month. Compared to a not so distant time when I slept a lot less, it is also a rather modest number. But when I think about how much I have left of all these readings, I am frightened. I regret to think that many have left no traces. On the other hand, slowing down the pace would mean giving up one of the greatest pleasures in life. I am bulimic, should I go on a diet?
-M.
How m.,
on January 13, while you were doing your bibliometric calculations, what was I doing? I have no idea, and I hope that no crime has been committed in my neighborhood, because if the investigators swooped into my house to ask me for an alibi point-blank I would do a silent scene and end up in handcuffs. And what did I do three days ago? Again, the void. Total blackout. Yet twenty-four hours were full of actions, words, gestures, thoughts, chores to attend to, all by a protagonist who is much more close to my heart than fictional characters. There were also two or three meals that day, but I can’t tell you what I ate. I can reconstruct what I ate last night, but I won’t know again tonight. And what do I remember from my first years of life? A dozen snapshots, distorted and reworked over the decades to the point where, I am almost certain, they will have lost all grip with reality as it was. From the first forty-four thousand hours of my life – because there are so many, more or less, in five years – I could get maybe half a page of memories. Dejecting, right? But no pinafore cop will come to ask me about it in a smoky room, pointing a hot, blinding lamp at me.
When we think of the memories of our readings we too often have in mind typical situations in which we have to account for something – the police interrogation, the university exam, the presentation in front of an audience, the repetitions in the mirror before the interrogations at school. . In short, we make it a question of “declarative memory”, as scholars call it. What would we know about the books we have read? It’s a question that makes sense for a teacher, a student, a critic. But for those who, like you, see reading simply as “one of the greatest pleasures in life”, the question must be posed differently, perhaps on the notes of Charles Trenet: What remains of our loves? What remains of our literary loves?
I don’t remember anything from my early childhood, yet the child I was largely determined the adult I am. Likewise, I could not decently summarize the plot of theMan without qualities by Musil, perhaps the book that most influenced my sensitivity, my mentality, my way of looking at the world. And maybe the answer you are looking for is all here. What remains of our literary loves? We remain, and the way in which those readings have transformed us, have sharpened our perceptions, have opened new paths on which to march our thoughts, have made us wiser or more human. We are the embodied memory of our readings. You talk about bulimia and diet, and indeed the food analogy is enlightening. We are the result of thousands of lunches and dinners of which we do not remember anything. Maybe we liked them while we were at the table, but afterwards we lost all memory, if not the one that gave shape to our physical structure.
Nobody will come to ask you what you remember about one or the other novel. And if on January 13th there was a crime in your condominium and the police come knocking on your door, you still have a better chance than me of getting away with it: “Officer, I have nothing to do with it, I was calculating my readings under the pandemic. , I also wrote to the bibliopathologist “. I’ll be happy to be your alibi.