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WORK TITLE: The Art of Reading
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE: https://www.damonyoung.com.au/
CITY: Hobart
STATE: TA
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2009068086
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2009068086
HEADING: Young, Damon
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670 __ |a Distraction, 2008: |b t.p. (Damon Young) cover p. 4 (honorary fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne)
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PERSONAL
Born 1975, in Melbourne, Australia; married Ruth Quibell (a sociologist and writer); children: one son, one daughter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and philosopher. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, associate in School of Philosophy. School of Life, Melbourne, Australia, founding faculty member.
WRITINGS
Also author of poetry and children’s books. Contributor to journals and periodicals, including New Philosopher, Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian, and Australian.
SIDELIGHTS
Damon Young has written nonfiction books on a variety of subjects, including gardens, exercise, reading, and martial arts, in addition to producing poetry, children’s fiction, essays, and journalism. In The Art of Reading, he presents both a survey of his reading habits and a philosophy of reading. He looks at the virtues identified by Aristotle–curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice–and how they relate to reading, with a chapter devoted to each. “These virtues are never developed alone,” he explained in a blog post on the website for Powell’s Books, an Oregon-based bookseller. “We are social animals, and our excellences are cultivated gregariously alongside rival ideas of beauty, goodness, and justice.” He continued: “This is the immense value of book clubs, book groups, literary critics, panels — they increase our familiarity with other ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling. They share the meal, so to speak. I wrote The Art of Reading partly for this reason: it’s a companion to the literary experience. I’m saying, ‘Try this. What do you taste?'”
Reading engenders some of these virtues and makes use of others, he writes in The Art of Reading. Some books help readers ti learn patience by accepting the reality of their world, he says, while others satisfy curiosity about other worlds or provide a needed escape from reality. He examines a broad spectrum of esteemed authors, mostly European–Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others–while also making room in his study for genre fiction and comic books. He details his love, for instance, for the Sherlock Holmes stories, Batman comics, and novels set in the Star Trek universe. He laments the decline in reading, and exhorts his audience to appreciate books, carefully and thoughtfully. “Writing takes the stuff of daily life and crafts it into an innovative view of self and world,” he writes in the book. “The ‘dim little meaning’ Sartre saw in ordinary sensation is given a new significance. Ideas are brought together in surprising ways; emotions moved from memory to fantasy; perceptions revivified or revised. While reading might not use every limb or organ, it draws on the fullness of life, rendering it with clarity, durability or vividness.” Overall, he notes, “reading is an introduction to a more ambitious mind.”
Several critics considered The Art of Reading an ambitious work but a generally successful one. The slim volume, according to Australian reviewer Geordie Williamson, is “large in the sense that it seeks to reorient and recalibrate our reading senses in an age of distraction. Large in its faith that as individuals and citizens, we will embrace the notion that reading well is an obligation: a matter of ethics as much as aesthetics. And large in the sense that its 139 pages hold what Ruskin called a king’s treasure: it contains portals to a thousand other worlds.” The book, noted Irish Times contributor Andrew Gallix. “is not just another bibliomemoir; it is also a manifesto of sorts.” Young’s “ambitious goal,” he related, “is to re-enchant an activity which, ‘cosmically speaking’, is very much ‘against the odds.’”
Young makes this call to action in a manner that is accessible and often humorous, some reviewers noted. “This literary study is serious but also witty and fun—a tough balance to strike, but Young nails it,” reported a Publishers Weekly critic. Robert Frantzeskos, writing online at Readings, termed the book “both an adroit and varied exercise, which examines and celebrates the way we read by delivering a public reflection, on an otherwise private art.” Young, he said, “displays an ability to weave between philosophy and literature,” as well as “a genuine curiosity.” A Kirkus Reviews commentator observed that Young “expresses himself gracefully and remains grounded most of the time.” The critic summed up The Art of Reading as “a worthy challenge to read bravely, to regard deeply, and to weigh ideas with discernment and generosity.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Australian, March 19, 2016, Geordie Williamson, eview of The Art of Reading.
California Bookwatch, March, 2011. review of Martial Arts and Philosophy.
Irish Times, December 23, 2017, Andrew Gallix, review of The Art of Reading.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Art of Reading.
Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2018, review of The Art of Reading.
ONLINE
Damon Young website, https://www.damonyoung.com.au (July 18, 2018).
Melbourne University Press website, https://www.mup.com.au/ (July 18, 2018), excerpt from The Art of Reading.
Kate Forsyth website, http://www.kateforsyth.com.au/ (December 20, 2013), Kate Forsyth, interview with Damon Young.
Powell’s Books website, http://www.powells.com/ (April 24, 2018), essay by Damon Young.
Readings, https://www.readings.com.au/ (March 30, 2016), Robert Frantzeskos, review of The Art of Reading.
DAMON YOUNG
Damon Young is an award-winning philosopher and author.
Damon's eleven books of nonfiction and children's fiction are published internationally in English and translation.
He writes for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular radio and festival guest. Damon has also published poetry and short fiction.
He is an Associate in the School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and Founding Faculty at the School of Life, Melbourne.
A Melburnian by birth, Damon now lives in Hobart with his wife, sociologist & author Ruth Quibell, and their son and daughter.
Quoted in Sidelights: “is not just another bibliomemoir; it is also a manifesto of sorts.” Young’s “ambitious goal,” he related, “is to re-enchant an activity which, ‘cosmically speaking’, is very much ‘against the odds.’”
Portrait of author Damon Young as a reader
‘The Art of Reading’ is more than a bibliomemoir – it is also a manifesto of sorts
Reading, Damon Young laments, is grossly undervalued, its wonders all too soon forgotten. Photograph: Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill
Reading, Damon Young laments, is grossly undervalued, its wonders all too soon forgotten. Photograph: Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill
Andrew Gallix
Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 06:00
Book Title:
The Art of Reading
ISBN-13:
978-1911344186
Author:
Damon Young
Publisher:
Scribe
Guideline Price:
£9.99
The vintage fingerprints and splashes of egg yolk adorning my Ladybird edition of The Three Little Pigs. The wild flowers pressed between the pages of a Danilo Kiš. We measure out our lives with books as well as coffee spoons. Those we have read, those we have not; above all, those that have read us. “To my right is a small stained pine bookcase,” writes Damon Young at the beginning of The Art of Reading. “It contains, among other things, my childhood.”
On the latter subject, and his subsequent development, he remains rather tight-lipped. Reading, we learn, was initially “a prop in [his] performance of superiority” and, crucially, a “liberation from school’s banality and home’s atmosphere of violence”. At the age of 11, he sought refuge from his father’s “morning screams” in ninja books and make-believe. As a teenager he was “Prufrock avoiding Prufrock”. Finally he alludes to his wife’s “grave illness” which rendered him incapable of finishing AS Byatt’s Still Life. There ends the confessional: this is a portrait of the author as a reader.
In the expository chapter Young navigates his way round the labyrinthine shelves of his own Library of Babel, travelling back and forth in time, both personal and historical. His early passion for Sherlock Holmes was shared by William Gibson, whose evocation leads – “[T]wo shelves under” him – to Orhan Pamuk’s reflections on childhood perusal and then on to Edith Wharton’s – “[T]wo rooms behind and one century before him” – and from thence to Rousseau, Sartre, de Beauvoir (close to the former “in [his] library as in life”) and so on. Taking in Batman as well as Heidegger, the breadth of reference is impressive, but never overbearing, thanks to the Australian philosopher’s lightness of touch, self-deprecating humour and endearing deployment of the word “bunkum”. Having traced a desire path through a lifetime of books, Young reflects upon six Aristotelian virtues (curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice) that reading requires, exhibits or promotes.
Australian author Tim Winton: his work is absorbed by nature, land and sea and a bestiary of life. Photograph: Aidan CrawleyTim Winton: The Shepherd’s Hut review – a man on the run in the outback
Caitlin Moran’s novel is bubbling with pop culture, featuring a hero every girl needs
Hennessy New Irish Writing: June 2018’s winning story – Smoke
Olivia Laing: a virtuoso in not precisely inhabiting other lives but repurposing mood and experience, turning things topsy-turvy to model brilliantly original text. Photograph: Manchester Literature Festival Crudo review: novel enters the mind of Kathy Acker
Laura McKenna.Hennessy New Irish Writing: June 2018’s winning poems
Ambitious goal
The Art of Reading is not just another bibliomemoir; it is also a manifesto of sorts. The author shuns a utilitarian approach to his subject – regarded as “an end in itself” – summarily listing its ancillary benefits with a commendable degree of scepticism. After all, “bastards enjoy fiction too” and, as he cheekily points out, some of them are authors. His ambitious goal is to re-enchant an activity which, “cosmically speaking”, is very much “against the odds”. Reading, he laments, is grossly undervalued, its wonders all too soon forgotten.
It tends to be thought of as a rudimentary skill, acquired in early childhood, rather than a lifelong project to be honed from Miffy to Proust. It has the added disadvantage of being a largely invisible pursuit, incapable of competing with the social cachet conferred by authorship, or rather the “fantasy of publication”. A text, however, is “only ever half finished by the writer”; it is the reader who brings it to life. Should the human race be wiped out, books would be “lived in, eaten, buried, climbed upon, oxidised, but not read”.
Young contends that the reader’s demiurgic power is not only forgotten, but also repressed, because of the anxiety it generates in highlighting the contingency of our books and lives: “Giddiness arises as I become aware of my responsibility for affirming one world and not another, and the fragility of whatever is chosen. Every string of letters can be an existential challenge”. What Michel Foucault called the “author function” is thus “a way of making reading safe”. Words become “someone else’s job”: the book “just means this, end of story”.
An escape
If Young explores how Rousseau or Sartre became fully aware of their existence through reading, he also considers how fiction may provide an escape from the confines of the self – Dickens’s “hope of something beyond that place and time” – and the increasing encroachment of the actual upon the possible.
In order to truly appreciate a text we must also “overcome our egocentrism”, which Virginia Woolf signally failed to do vis-a-vis Joyce, whom she initially read through the prism of class snobbery and rivalry. The philosopher concedes, however, that Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing” has its limits. We are “partial beings” whose “incompleteness varies” with age, so that some novels – Henry James’s in the case of Evelyn Waugh – need to be grown into.
Most importantly, perhaps, literature enables us “to stifle the little oligarch” within. Villains – in fiction as well as fact – “see all things as a means to an end”, which is always “some vision of perfection”. Reading teaches us to accept that things simply are, and that they may end without concluding: “Only the Library of Babel continues. It makes sense to restlessly move between artworks, never believing that any one is perfect.”
INTERVIEW: Damon Young, author of Philosophy in the Garden
Friday, December 20, 2013
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I was really fascinated and enthralled by Damon Young's latest book Philosophy in the Garden and so I'm very glad to welcome him to the blog today to answer a few quick but tricky questions.
Tell me about PHILOSOPHY IN THE GARDEN.
For thousands of years, gardens have inspired poets, philosophers, novelists -- why?
Looking into the lives of great artists and writers, this book reveals the intellectual value of parks, yards and pots. They can provide quiet, exercise, food and beauty, but they can also prompt us to meditate and reflect. Jane Austen turned to her cottage garden for quiet consolation, while philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wandered amongst lemon trees for an existential kick in the pants. Novelist Marcel Proust discovered miniature immensity in a bonsai, and scandalous author Colette found peace in roses. Gardens are not just ornaments or status symbols: they are also intellectual companions, which enhance and enliven our minds.
What do you love most in the world?
Life. Not any old life, but this one: fraught, baffling, and coloured with gratitude for my family, friends and vocation.
What do you fear most in the world?
Being cruel -- particularly to my wife and children. The end of civilisation. And robot assassins.
What are your 5 favourite childhood books?
The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton (aged 3-5).
Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf (aged 3-5).
The Asterix series, by Goscinny and Uderzo (aged 4-10).
The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (11-15).
Ghostrider, The Punisher and Batman comics (aged 12-17).
What are your 5 favourite books read as an adult?
NONFICTION
Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger.
A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume.
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, by Roberto Calasso.
FICTION/POETRY
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis
Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
The Golden Bowl, by Henry James.
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
A shelf of superhero graphic novels, including Captain America, Wolverine, the Batman and Wonder Woman.
How would you describe perfect happiness?
'Happiness' the noun is dodgy. (See the next issue of New Philosopher magazine for my essay on this.) But what makes me happy is doing good work, artfully. It feels like this sounds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWy8iibtd98
You have a new book out. Tell me about it.
How to Think About Exercise is about wholeness. It can often seem like we're split in two: mental and physical, thinking and doing, office and gym. But exercise can enhance and enrich our minds, while the right states-of-mind can improve our exercise. Swimming, for example, can give a glimpse of the sublime, while jogging can make us more consistent. Rock climbing involves humility, but also provides the pleasure of being 'in the zone'. Sprinting rewards us with pride in ourselves, while yoga can do away with our selves altogether. In each case, fitness involves a to-and-fro between psyche and flesh, which can be edifying -- and bloody good fun. By keeping wholeness in mind, we can also avoid the lapsed or wasted gym membership: the insights, impressions and reveries of exercise last a lifetime, not just for a few fat-burning weeks.
Quoted in Sidelights: “These virtues are never developed alone,” he explained in a blog post on the website for Powell’s Books, an Oregon-based bookseller. “We are social animals, and our excellences are cultivated gregariously alongside rival ideas of beauty, goodness, and justice.” He continued: “This is the immense value of book clubs, book groups, literary critics, panels — they increase our familiarity with other ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling. They share the meal, so to speak. I wrote The Art of Reading partly for this reason: it’s a companion to the literary experience. I’m saying, ‘Try this. What do you taste?'”
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ORIGINAL ESSAYS
'The Art of Reading'
by Damon Young, April 24, 2018 10:00 AM
The Art of Reading by Damon Young
I begin with the hunger of Albert Camus. The philosopher, novelist, and playwright was born in French Algeria, living for much of his childhood in a home without electricity or running water. No oven — just an alcohol stove. No toilets — just holes in the masonry. And no father: his dad, Lucien, was killed by shrapnel when Camus was a baby. In The First Man, Camus wrote of his mother Catherine's "gnarled" hands, broken by years of scrubbing floors and wringing laundry. He described his grandmother's whip, the bull pizzle, used when the boy did not obey.
But this was no simple lament. Camus also offered his childhood pleasures: the Mediterranean sea, the smell of dirt in autumn rains, soccer matches, the stoic manliness of sailors, even the stink of urine after days of banal office labor in the lycée holidays. One notable joy: borrowing books. The boys walked from the library to the main street, skimmed the text under streetlights, then ran to their homes to read under paraffin lamps. Camus wrote that he wanted "small type stretching all the way across tightly justified lines, filled to the brim with words and sentences, like those enormous rustic dishes you can eat at long and heartily without ever emptying them."
This is Camus's hunger. His urge to dash into the Algerian waves, or stand squinting into the tempest — this was how he read. "Devouring everything indiscriminately," he said he "swallowed the best at the same time as the worst." Camus consumed words, and then digested their fantasies of comedy and heroism, metabolising them until they were him. His desire for life pushed him to fight, to hammer, to kick — and crack those cloth spines, with their scent of ink and glue.
When I picture my own boyhood and youth, it is, among other things, less savory, an endless meal of these literary courses. Like Camus, I was as starved for text as I was for salt water swimming and fried chicken and, later, a glimpse of thighs under the classroom desk. This was not simply a calculated choice or neutral preference — it was an urge. My point is that reading is not just a cognitive pursuit. It is intellectual, of course: an achievement of high abstraction. But entangled with the cerebral is the visceral: passion, ardor, avidity, yearning. We readers are rational animals — but animals nonetheless, whose whole bodies feed on words.
But why? Why drool for new releases, or remember The Magic Faraway Tree as delicious as an all-day gobstopper? Reading offers experiences. And this is no small thing, because life always involves experience: doing and undergoing, acting and reacting, speaking and replying, perceiving and being perceived. Existence is a to-and-fro between creature and environment, self and world, I and thou. Like all art, the written word provides an experience: sensation, emotion, and thought, given new unity. Some new shape, form, pattern.
We are social animals, and our excellences are cultivated gregariously alongside rival ideas of beauty, goodness, and justice.
While we often defend reading as the means to some end, these experiences are ends in themselves. And if reading does have handy perks, this is chiefly found in the experience. To recognise my own bizarre relationship to success, it's not enough to know about Comstock in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I have to smell his dingy bookshop, listen to his screeching against money, feel the grease in his clothes, and watch his babyish cruelties to his girlfriend, Rosemary. But these literary experiences aren't just there. The reader has to turn signs into sense. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he said: "There is no art except for and by others."
Reading is an act of liberty, in which we freely and knowingly take responsibility for turning words into worlds. So how do we read well? In The Art of Reading, I argue that this is best encouraged by virtues. This sounds stuffy, but the original Greek word, areté, simply meant "excellence": there were physical virtues, intellectual virtues, ethical virtues. It is a desirable quality of character, which had nothing to do with pearl-clutching righteousness or specialist expertise.
A virtue is a kind of whole-person bent: a knowing disposition to behave in the right way at the right time, which includes appetites, emotions, and reasons. Virtue is not inbuilt, nor is it utterly foreign to us. "Neither by nature…nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us," Aristotle writes. "[R]ather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."
Not just any bent will do. Every virtue is a mean between extremes: a deficiency and an excess. For example, it is cowardly to give up on A. S. Byatt's brilliant short story, "The Chinese Lobster," because it prompts me to reconsider my prejudices about artists or academics. But it's foolhardy to keep reading if it will push me to suicidal ideation. Courage is the mean: I recognize the challenge to my biases, but continue because the story offers aesthetic rewards, intellectual discovery, and emotional vibrancy.
I've divided up The Art of Reading into six virtues which encourage good reading: curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice. The point is not to carve a stone tablet of the virtues, but to share my vision of reading at its best, reading that affords the most subtle, vivid, varied literary experiences over a lifetime.
What might this look like? Here is perhaps my favorite: Curiosity.
Curiosity is not a classical virtue, but it's vital for excellent reading. As David Hume argued, curiosity is pleasure in intellectual effort, the joy so many of us feel when exercising our minds. So it's not study for professional duty, or the aesthetic buzz of fine prose. It's a very specific cognitive reward. And what gratifies curiosity is not banal fact — things can be true but trivial. Curiosity requires seemingly important and unusual discovery, if only to maintain attention. A fine example is the Argentinian author Jorge Borges, who was always weaving from book to book, genre to genre, showing the ties between them. In one essay alone he moves from Cicero, to Blaise Pascal, to Thomas Huxley, to Lewis Carroll.
In this way, curiosity broadens our outlook. What we first see as a standalone achievement is often threaded from some wider tapestry. Batman appears to be a unique cultural figure — and superheroes like the Green Arrow or Moon Knight are mocked as Batman knockoffs. But Batman was derived from Zorro, The Shadow, Nick Carter, and from an entire genre including authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. To really understand Batman is to recognize these much larger entanglements, to say nothing of the broader cultural themes that make a fascist vigilante in a rodent outfit seem plausible.
Curiosity is valuable because it seeks out where things come from, how things might have been otherwise — and in this, it heightens our sensitivity to the work itself. Of all the genres, and all the plots, and all the symbols, and all the words, the author chose this. Curiosity undoes the glib charisma of the actual.
These virtues are never developed alone. We are social animals, and our excellences are cultivated gregariously alongside rival ideas of beauty, goodness, and justice.
This is the immense value of book clubs, book groups, literary critics, panels — they increase our familiarity with other ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling. They share the meal, so to speak. I wrote the Art of Reading partly for this reason: it's a companion to the literary experience. I'm saying, "Try this. What do you taste?"
Fellow bibliophiles: Bon appétit.
÷ ÷ ÷
Damon Young is a prizewinning philosopher and writer. He is the author of seven books, including How to Think About Exercise, Philosophy in the Garden, and Distraction. His works are published internationally in English and translation, and he has also written poetry and short fiction. Young is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. The Art of Reading is his most recent book.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Writing takes the stuff of daily life and crafts it into an innovative view of self and world,” he writes in the book. “The ‘dim little meaning’ Sartre saw in ordinary sensation is given a new significance. Ideas are brought together in surprising ways; emotions moved from memory to fantasy; perceptions revivified or revised. While reading might not use every limb or organ, it draws on the fullness of life, rendering it with clarity, durability or vividness.”
An extract from “The Art of Reading”
To my right is a small stained pine bookcase. It contains, among other things, my childhood.
Stacked in muted burgundy and khaki buckram are classics like Aesop’s Fables, full of blunt aphorisms for 4-year-olds: ‘To be well prepared for war is the best guarantee of peace’. Not far away is Richard Burton’s translation of The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, with its formally phrased smut (‘he laid his hand under her left armpit, whereupon his vitals and her vitals yearned for coition’). Still read after seven decades, my mother’s octavo The Magic Faraway Tree — mystery, adventure and casual corporal punishment. I also have her Winnie the Pooh, printed the year she was born. Seventy years on, her grandson now has Eeyore days. (‘Good morning, Pooh Bear … If it is a good morning … Which I doubt.’) But most important for me, standing face out in black plastic leather and fake gold leaf, is The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes
Early illustration of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget
Holmes was my first literary world. Proudly bigger than anything read by my primary school peers, Conan Doyle’s 800-page tome was a prop in my performance of superiority. This archaic lump of text helped me feel special. I was more clever, said the serious serif font, than the other 11-year-olds; more intellectually brave, said the ornamental binding, than my teachers.
Sherlock Holmes was a kind of existential dress-up — an adult I tried on for size. I made our common traits a uniform: social abruptness, emotional flight, pathological curiosity. In Conan Doyle’s prose, this make-believe was more stylish than my clumsy boyhood persona. Take the first lines from The Sign of the Four: ‘Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.’ My detective was an addict: but with panache. (I kept a dictionary for words like ‘morocco’. And ‘panache’.)
Holmes was not my first book. I was already in that ‘promised land’, as Vladimir Nabokov put it in Speak, Memory, ‘where … words are meant to mean what they mean’. I learned to read with the ‘Asterix’ adventures, when my parents refused to voice the speech boxes. If I wanted the puns and fisticuffs, I had to parse the text myself. Beside my bed there was also a lion who swallowed vegetable soup instead of rabbits; dinosaurs against industrial pollution; and Ferdinand the pacifist bull. These were training and, later, distraction. Like Germaine Greer, who ‘read for greed’, I kept myself busy with words on paper — an urge closer to rapacity than curiosity. These desires combined in ‘Garfield’, as I devoured cartoons and lasagne with equal urgency.Yet there was more to The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes than my pretence. What I finally took from Conan Doyle’s mysteries was not savoir faire but freedom: the charisma of an independent mind. This Victorian London, with its shadows and blood, was mine. I winced as Holmes ‘thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston’, but the needle and its rush were my own to invent. Watson’s gentlemanly heroism, and Inspector Lestrade’s mediocrity: all belonging to the little boy lying quietly on the flokati rug. So my Holmesian education was only partly about general knowledge — the symbolic pips of the Ku Klux Klan, the atmosphere of moors, the principles of deduction. It was also, more crucially, schooling in the exertion of my own psyche. I willed this strange world into being, with help from Conan Doyle. The author was less like an entertaining uncle, and more like a conspirator. We met in private to secure my liberation from school’s banality and home’s atmosphere of violence.
The Art of Reading
The Art of Reading
Damon Young
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But with The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, I had a new sense of greater mastery, and pleasure in this discovery. Part of me saw Holmes as a legendary historical hero, and I enjoyed what novelist Michael Chabon called the ‘happy confusion’ of fact and fiction. Another part of me, burgeoning and a little buzzed, was doing away with deference. I realised that these dark marks on paper were mine to ignore or investigate, enrich or evade. It was with the junky detective that I first became aware of myself as something powerful: a reader.
Three decades later, my bookshelves are punctuated by discoveries of this imaginative independence. For these authors, the written word encouraged a new liberty: to think, perceive or feel with greater awareness.
Novelist William Gibson, whom I read as a teenager, is currently shelved in the garage between Ian Fleming’s pubescent thrillers and Harry Harrison’s galactic satire. Also roused by Sherlock Holmes as a boy, Gibson transformed his drab suburban neighbourhood into Victorian England, one brick wall at a time. ‘I could imagine that there was an infinite number of similar buildings in every direction,’ Gibson told The Paris Review, ‘and I was in Sherlock Holmes’s London.’ Conan Doyle’s stories were more than escapism or amusement for Gibson. They beckoned him to invent.
Two shelves under Gibson, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk recalled reading as relief from tears of boredom, and as a flight from confronting fact. In Other Colours, the novelist congratulated himself, as I did, on ‘possessing greater depth than those who do not read’. This was partly juvenile boastfulness. But it was also an acknowledgement of the work involved: turning black text into an illuminated theatre. Pamuk wrote of the ‘creator’s bliss’ he enjoyed as a child reader, putting his mind to work with words.
A Backward Glance
Two rooms behind and one century before Pamuk is American novelist Edith Wharton. Invited into her father’s library as a child, she found a private sanctuary: a ‘kingdom’, as she put it. ‘There was in me a secret retreat,’ she wrote in A Backward Glance, ‘where I wished no one to intrude.’ This was more than withdrawal. With the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Alexander Pope and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the criticism of John Ruskin, the novels of Walter Scott, Wharton played with exciting new themes and rhythms. She wrote about reading as a cultivation and celebration of her growing personality — what she called ‘the complex music of my strange inner world’. The novelist believed that she became more fully herself in those yellowing pages.
Eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, stacked two feet to the left of Wharton, read romantic novels late into the night with his widower father. The stories made him aware, for the first time, of his own mind. ‘It is from my earliest reading,’ he wrote in his Confessions, ‘that I date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence.’ The point is not only that Rousseau’s emotions were encouraged by the novels, but also that he recognised them as his. And while the philosopher (characteristically) blamed fiction for his own histrionic bent, the melodrama arose chiefly out of little Jean-Jacques.
The shelf under Rousseau holds the modern philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. He discovered his literary authority in a sixth-floor apartment, looking down on Paris, his grandfather’s books in his hands. Words gave the boy a certain mastery over himself: he was a demiurge, bestowing the world with life, in language. ‘The Universe lay spread at my feet and each thing was humbly begging for a name,’ he wrote, ‘and giving it one was like both creating it and taking it.’ Sartre also collected American westerns and detective comics, and their heroic caricature — lone brave man against the world — remained in his philosophy, decades later.
Simone de Beauvoir, close to Sartre in my library as in life, remembered the security of books. Not only because of their docile bourgeois morality, but also because they obeyed her. ‘They said what they had to say, and didn’t pretend to say anything else,’ de Beauvoir wrote in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, ‘when I was not there, they were silent.’ She recognised that they asked for conviction and artistry — from Simone, rather than simply from the authors. De Beauvoir called this ‘the sorcery that transmutes printed symbols into stories’: without a reader, the magic stops.
Sartre
There is no one-size-fits-all discovery of literary power. Reading is thick with the quirks of era, family and psychology. Some, like Rousseau, find romantic urges. Others, like Sartre, find enlightenment domination. There can be pretence, narcissism and cowardice. (But enough about me.) In many cases, there is a longing for what philosopher Herbert Marcuse labelled ‘holiday reality’: an asylum from ordinariness. Charles Dickens wrote about this as his boyhood ‘hope of something beyond that place and time’. But as Dickens’ later popularity suggests, these moments of youthful bibliophilia also coincide with the discovery of clout. The child is becoming aware, not only of worlds populated with detectives, Gauls or bulls, but also of an ‘I’: the reader, whose consent and creativity brings these worlds into being. Reading is an introduction to a more ambitious mind.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in What is Literature?, wrote: ‘There is no art except for and by others’. The philosopher’s argument was not that authors cannot enjoy writing for themselves; that every word is dashed off, hand aching, for tyrannical editors and audiences — what Henry James described in one letter as ‘the devouring maw into which I … pour belated copy’. Instead, Sartre’s point was that the text is only ever half finished by the writer. Without a reader, the text is a stream of sensations: dark and light shapes.
This does not mean ordinary life is a play of dumb necessity. Sensation always has some significance for humans — we are creatures of meaning, and the universe is never spied as a naked fact. But the world writ large does not refer to things fluently; the suggestions are often vague. ‘The dim little meaning which dwells within it,’ wrote Sartre of everyday sensation, ‘a light joy, a timid sadness, remains imminent or trembles about it like a heat mist.’ Ordinary life has a hazy atmosphere to it, whereas language illuminates brightly and sharply.
The letters achieve this by pointing beyond themselves — we read through the text, not off it. ‘There is prose when the word passes across our gaze,’ said Sartre, quoting the poet Paul Valéry, ‘as the glass across the sun.’ Words are portals of sorts: they frame reality, and become invisible as we peer.
Not all texts are as transparent as Sartre’s ideal prose. Poetry can be more opaque. Take Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Bookcase’. It refers literally to the poet’s library, but it also makes a spectacle of the English tongue. ‘Ashwood or oakwood? Planed to silkiness / Mitred, much eyed-along, each vellum-pale / Board in the bookcase held and never sagged.’ Alliteration, rhythm, metaphor: this is about a thing and its resonances, but it is also about language. Poetry puts on a show of words, just as painting displays colour, and music sound. Poetic phrases, wrote German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘haul back and bring to a standstill the fleeting word that points beyond itself ’.
Language can be translucent like amber or clear like Valéry’s glass, but staring through it always asks for effort. Inscriptions or projections become words, which have meanings alongside their tone and cadence. This is what I first recognised in Sherlock Holmes: reading is always a transformation of sensation into sense. ‘You have to make them all out of squiggles,’ poet D Nurkse wrote, ‘like the feelers of dead ants.’
For the reader, this means rendering a world: the intricate ensemble beyond the page. When Conan Doyle writes that the sun is visible ‘through the dim veil which hangs over the great city’, I recreate London. Not only the sky’s spray of yellow and grey, but also the coal and commerce that make the metropolis ‘great’. The newspaper reporting the death of Sherlock’s client also evokes a community of middle-class readers from Cornwall to Northumberland, all participating in the imagined community of print. Waterloo Station, to which the victim was hurrying, suggests steam trains across England: taking passengers and parcels of The Times for men like Watson to read. All this I project behind the foreground prose. ‘The objects represented by art,’ as Sartre put it, ‘appear against the background of the universe.’ I piece together a cosmos from the author’s fragments.
What this all reinforces is that writing cannot make anything happen. As an infant, earlier editions of The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes were wholly opaque to me: blocks of chewable stuff. And as an 11-year-old I was not forced to imagine Holmes in his ‘velvet-lined arm-chair’, pushing blow into his blood. I had to commit myself to the text; to consent to a kind of active passivity, in which I accepted Conan Doyle’s words, then took responsibility for giving them some totality.
Reading requires some quantum of autonomy: no-one compels me to envisage their words. They are, at best, an invitation. Sartre phrases this as an ‘appeal’, and the idea makes sense of how little necessity is at play. Reading is always a meeting of two liberties: the artist’s and the audience’s.
In this light, it was false to say that my childhood is in the pine bookcase. It can seem this way, because old tomes prompt nostalgia. As Marcel Proust noted in On Reading, some memories of youth are lost in daily life, but regained in the pages we read during those years. ‘They are the only calendars we have kept,’ he writes, ‘of days that have vanished’. But if I never read these volumes again, the recollections can become Proust’s temps perdu: lost time. Whatever is most animated in the written word is only revived ‘when the dead letter comes again into contact’, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘with a life willing to resurrect it’.
This is a more general point. My books are just objects alongside other objects: pigment, glue, dead cellulose and cowskin. If they do not enter into specific relations with very specific objects — literate humans — then reading never happens. Reading in general might one day cease altogether. If the species known to itself as Homo sapiens becomes extinct, all these readable things — books, newspapers, tweets, billboards, roadside signs, subatomic initials on copper — will no longer be texts, strictly speaking. They will be lived in, eaten, buried, climbed upon, oxidised, but not read.
The ubiquity of script masks the rarity and fragility of reading. What you are doing right now is, cosmically speaking, against the odds.
An assumption: you enjoy this unlikely activity. For most readers, this is an untroubled devotion. It is easy to identify with playwright Tom Stoppard, who spent his bus fare on second-hand books, ‘preferring the devil of hitchhiking to the deep blue sea of enduring half an hour bookless’. Identifying why we care is less straightforward.
Most obviously, reading is educational. This is why my parents intoned Blyton nightly, and why I spent so many afternoons sounding out Miffy at the Galleryto my daughter. An early introduction to the written word provides an enormous personal and political advantage. Researchers Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich reported that children’s literature encourages a profuse vocabulary: 50 per cent more unusual words than the chatter of university students, or the most popular television. This lexical abundance then encourages more reading: positive feedback that begins well before school, and lasts a lifetime. Along the way, reading piles up vast stocks of otherwise obscure facts. Political gambits, scientific hypotheses, historical dramas: these become the taken-for-granted ground upon which citizens walk. Texts help to lay this foundation in childhood.
The written word can also boost psychological health and social connection. Studies suggest that a lifetime’s reading, alongside company and exercise, can lessen dementia risk. Emory University researchers reported that participants reading a novel had more neural connectivity in the language and sensory motor regions of the brain. Lead author Gregory Berns wrote that ‘reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist’. What seems like an ethereal pursuit actually offers a visceral commingling. Research also suggests that literary fiction can contribute to a theory of mind, the idea we have of others’ mental states. A New School for Social Research study revealed that reading authors like Don DeLillo or Anton Chekhov caused a brief but measurable jump in emotional intelligence: in this case, judging a stranger’s mood from their eyes.
While it is flattering for bibliophiles to believe their pages guarantee a payoff, scepticism is warranted. Regular jogging might prevent mental decline far more reliably than reading Haruki Murakami on jogging. Some studies have small sample sizes or vague measures: brain scans say nothing about behaviour, or whether reading has unusual effects next to other pastimes. Others generalise too boldly about genres: does Chekhov have the same effects as Kazuo Ishiguro or Iris Murdoch? And even if DeLillo helps me guess someone’s humour, I can be correct without being sympathetic or caring — bastards enjoy fiction too. (Some are authors.) Reading has demonstrable benefits, but it is not a machine for producing geniuses or saints.
This outlook also values reading as a means to an end. This is important, and covers many kinds of genuine worth: historical, philosophical, culinary, sexual. I pick up Conan Doyle to learn about Victorian London or Immanuel Kant to better comprehend modern ethical theory. Some read for symbolic capital, others for last-minute dinner recipes, others for orgasm (‘a sort of ecstasy came over me after I had read for about an hour’, said the heroine in eighteenth-century French bestseller Thérèse the Philosopher). There is no harm in highlighting the benefits of text, whether straightforward or subtle, scholarly or biological. But this approach can ignore how reading is an end in itself: an opportunity for experiences.
Experience is vital: literally, to do with life. As philosopher John Dewey argued, my organic existence is experience: a to-and-fro between creature and milieu. I act upon things, and they upon me. I receive impressions, but my mind gives them colour, shape, significance. These prompt some reflex, habit or choice, which invites a response from the world. And so on.
‘The career and destiny of a living being,’ Dewey wrote, ‘are bound up with its interchanges with its environment … in the most intimate way.’ This whole interplay between myself and the cosmos is neither chaos nor perfect harmony, but unfolds in rhythms. We cannot know with absolute certainty what this universe is; cannot accept a naïve realism, which does away with philosophical doubt. But even here, the primacy of experience is clear: a creaturely play between self and other, which includes confusion about the edges of each.
Reading affords experiences. It does this, not by deputising me to solve crimes at Baker Street or doping me up to punch Roman centurions, but by tying signs to sense. Writing takes the stuff of daily life and crafts it into an innovative view of self and world. The ‘dim little meaning’ Sartre saw in ordinary sensation is given a new significance. Ideas are brought together in surprising ways; emotions moved from memory to fantasy; perceptions revivified or revised. While reading might not use every limb or organ, it draws on the fullness of life, rendering it with clarity, durability or vividness. ‘Every work of art follows the plan of, and pattern of, a complete experience,’ Dewey wrote, ‘rendering it more intensely and concentratedly felt.’
This art need not be literary fiction or verse. While the best novels or poems are certainly transformative, disciplines like philosophy also offer experiences. The timbre of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics departs from that of Homer’s Iliad, but Aristotle still offers a unique portrait of the cosmos, which includes its emotional atmospheres. Our doings and undergoings are not monopolised by any one literary form. From a quip on social media to biblical scrolls, writing gestures at some larger congress with the world; some universe beyond the glyphs. Whatever benefits reading offers, they are only gained in this experience: as part of a more general commingling with things.
With readers, this experience is often valued for its own sake. First, there is the pleasure of exertion. As David Hume noted in his A Treatise of Human Nature, mental effort is gratifying. We seek truth, he writes, because of ‘the genius and capacity, which is employed in its invention and discovery’. This is as true of reading fiction as doing philosophy: either way, we are flexing psychological muscles.
But just as important is the world this labour offers. I read because I enjoy the experience of reading: the encounter with a refined and restored vision of life. This does not mean there is some invisible kernel of worth inside a book; that I can move quickly from my bliss to divinely given value, buried in dried cellulose and printer’s ink. It means that I enjoy the experience for the experience, and nothing more. Perhaps it is the quickening of my speculative intellect as I read Alfred North Whitehead, or the curt beauty of a Deborah Levy phrase; perhaps it is the nostalgia prompted by Holmes, or the embarrassed recognition of myself in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying; perhaps it is just the brief getaway, in a glib Star Trek novel, from the pain of living. This is why Virginia Woolf, in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, portrayed God as a little jealous of literary souls. ‘Look, these need no reward,’ he proclaimed to Saint Peter in paradise. ‘We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’ Reading is desirable for its own sake and, unless it causes harm, no excuses need be given.
Quoted in Sidelights: “expresses himself gracefully and remains grounded most of the time.” The critic summed up The Art of Reading as “a worthy challenge to read bravely, to regard deeply, and to weigh ideas with discernment and generosity.”
Print Marked Items
Young, Damon: THE ART OF READING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Young, Damon THE ART OF READING Scribe (Adult Nonfiction) $14.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-1-911344-18-6
A philosopher and ardent bibliophile assesses desirable qualities--curiosity, patience, pride, courage, temperance, justice--applied to the reading
and comprehension of literature, powers the attentive reader can learn to wield.
Young (How to Think About Exercise, 2014, etc.) offers a useful, erudite, and often arresting survey of philosophical thought featuring both
renowned figures in the discipline (Plato, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Schopenhauer) and those less well known, as well as penetrating
takes on novelists Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry James, and others. Scarcely a page goes by that Young is not quoting two or three
other writers to underscore or illustrate a point, which proves to be a double-edged approach. Though illuminating, occasionally it smacks of
ruminative padding. Throughout, the author expresses himself gracefully and remains grounded most of the time, though some passages are
unnecessarily dense and overintellectualized, even for a philosopher. He also can take an entire essay to elucidate a principle that could be dealt
with in a few paragraphs, and the narrative features engrossing arguments that, at times, can be carried too far. However, Young's approach is
agreeably individualistic and evenhanded. He presents, analyzes, and sometimes judges but always gives concepts a fair hearing. In youth, the
written word gave the author liberty to think, perceive, and feel with greater awareness, a passion he communicates with verve. The book is of
value to any serious reader but will be particularly instructive for young, insufficiently cautious literary critics, or critics in general. The most
companionable chapter is the last, "The Lumber Room," in which the author discusses the contents of his personal library--the source of many of
his reflections and a sort of advance scout for ambitious readers.
While Young's latest may be the essence of bookish preoccupation, it is a worthy challenge to read bravely, to regard deeply, and to weigh ideas
with discernment and generosity.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Young, Damon: THE ART OF READING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247929/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49b93600. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247929
Martial Arts and Philosophy
California Bookwatch.
(Mar. 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Martial Arts and Philosophy
Graham Priest and Damon Young, Editors
Open Court
70 East Lake St. #300, Chicago, IL 60601
9780812696844 $21.95 www.opencourtbooks.com
Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness provides a fine survey covering the philosophical undercurrents of martial arts training
and competition. Chapters designed to appeal to martial artists offer a series of questions on the philosophical, spiritual and sociological nature of
martial arts and its connections to violence and peace alike. Contributors are also practitioners of the fighting arts, so make for informed reflection
for even newcomers to either martial arts or philosophy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Martial Arts and Philosophy." California Bookwatch, Mar. 2011. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A251388810/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=810b72ee. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A251388810
Quoted in Sidelights: “large in the sense that it seeks to reorient and recalibrate our reading senses in an age of distraction. Large in its faith that as individuals and citizens, we will embrace the notion that reading well is an obligation: a matter of ethics as much as aesthetics. And large in the sense that its 139 pages hold what Ruskin called a king’s treasure: it contains portals to a thousand other worlds.”
GEORDIE WILLIAMSON
The Australian12:00AM March 19, 2016
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Damon Young’s latest foray into pop philosophy has a pithy if misleadingly “how-to’’ title. Yes, this is a book about the art of reading — and it is a fine and thoughtful survey of its particular field. But terms such as “art’’ and “reading’’ have been subtly devalued in the modern era, their earlier meanings worn to a polyester sheen. Reading was once regarded as a skill won from long practice, careful application and close observation; books were met with such formality that gown and caps were donned before a volume was opened. Today we slump in our pyjamas in front of a torrent of clickbait and listicles, a dozen tabs open at once on our screens. What Young lays down here, then, is a challenge to all of us who still presume to care about ink on paper. He does not outline an art of reading so much as an ethics of attention towards the written word.
The upshot is bracing. Those familiar with Young’s background as a guerilla philosopher will know that he is capable of citing Simone de Beauvoir and Batman in the same paragraph without diminishing the significance of either. And those who have read his series of wise, witty and learned efforts to simply explain complex ideas — or to unpack the buried complexity of ostensibly simple ones — will be aware that these are not mere intellectual exercises but full-length marathons of heart and mind.
This new mission is no different. Young has set out to remind us of what is at stake when we read a book: not just a few hours of our valuable time, but our secular souls. His introduction opens with the startling claim (though one also advanced by Proust in his preface to John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens) that the individual self is first created by submission to the invented selves of others. For the 11-year-old Young it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Asterix comics and Ferdinand the Bull; for the rest of us, it could be any book, any author. The point is that we recognise, in reading, a sense of something beyond ourselves — one that clarifies the parameters of our consciousness and beckons to mental states or imaginative realms that exceed them:
There is no one-size-fits-all discovery of literary power. Reading is quick with quirks of era, family, and psychology. ... In many cases, there is a longing for what Herbert Marcuse labelled “holiday reality’’: an asylum from ordinariness. Charles Dickens wrote about this as his boyhood hope of “something beyond that place and time’’. But as Dickens’s later popularity suggests, these moments of youthful bibliophilia also coincide with the discovery of clout. The child is becoming aware, not only of worlds populated by detectives, Gauls or bulls, but also of an “I’’: the reader, whose consent and creativity brings these worlds into being. Reading is an introduction to a more ambitious mind.
It is a heavy responsibility to lay down, though a fair one, since, as Young suggests, each book is no more than a dead object until its reader comes along and brings it to life. In this sense The Art of Reading proceeds in sympathy with literary theories developed during the 1970s and 80s by scholars like Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish beneath the umbrella of “reader-response’’. They argued that the reader was an active agent whose interpretative efforts imparted “real existence” to the work, and in doing so, they completed its meaning. This is no passive curl-up on the sofa with a cup of tea — more a care-filled, challenging, strenuous investment of self and mind.
Young anatomises this process by splitting the act of reading into a spectrum of individual virtues — curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice — and then devoting a chapter to each. These are idiosyncratic demarcations, and each is approached from an angle made oblique by Young’s wide and deep reading. Take Patience, which opens with a scene in which the Queen, quietly reading in Buckingham Palace, grows irate with Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, a late novel whose prose “is agonisingly protracted: clauses within clauses, commas and em dashes, constantly deferring the full stop’’. Her majesty soon tires of these Edwardian evasions: “Oh, do get on,’’ she finally exclaims.
What the author does here is use one literary construct — the Queen, crisply and fondly rendered by English author Alan Bennett in the novella The Uncommon Reader — to interrogate the ways in which another author (James) demands something of us which we late moderns have in short supply. The Queen in Bennett’s book is in her 70s; she has come late to reading after one of her corgis escaped into a lending library and obliged her to borrow a volume. Young describes her frustration and impatience as emerging from a sense of mortality: there are so many books to read, so little time in which to do so.
And yet there are benefits for the rest of us — presumably with a little more time on our hands — in accepting that some of the best reading is that which resists our impulse towards narrative sugar and fat. James is an extreme example of a broader phenomenon: the difficult writer who obliges us to slow down to walking pace, to grapple with minutiae, to linger, lost, in the maze of an authoritative imagination. Such books are a kind of duty, yet they are not empty pageants:
This is why endurance is cultivated: not simply for its own sake, but for some worthwhile end. For Aquinas and Augustine, patience is a virtue because the saint or martyr is hurt for salvation’s sake: “true patience of the righteous”, as Augustine put it, “from which is on them the love of God”. Clearly the Queen will not find redemption in The Golden Bowl, a tale of adultery and earthly marriage. But the point is clear enough: forbearance is valuable because it contributes to something good — otherwise it is simply stubbornness or numbness. Cicero’s definition, in his De Inventione, is typically concise: Patience is a voluntary and sustained endurance, for the sake of what is honourable or advantageous, of difficult or painful labours.
‘‘So getting to the final flyleaf is important,’’ Young concludes, ‘‘because reading the whole text offers something otherwise unobtainable.’’ This is an important distinction to draw. The Queen knows what it is to be bored — it is the necessary condition of her role. But the patience demanded of her by James is something different. He alerts her to the world beyond her head. The Golden Bowl unlocks her from the isolating prison of rank and permits her to enter the thoughts and emotional states of others. It is a cure for her constitutional aloofness, a belated education in alternative existences.
Though, like all virtues, patience is shaded by vice — in this case obduracy. And one of the pleasures of these essays is the way in which Young strikes a balance between such oppositions. After celebrating the radically original thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he swivels back to show how the man’s anti-Semitism and support for the Nazis emerged out of a lack of auto-examination. As a reader, he was a thrilling archeologist of language and concept; almost single-handedly, he revived the worth of philosophers who lived before Plato. And yet his inquisitiveness was damaged by intellectual overreach: he read into books of the past what he wished to see in the present. He saw in National Socialism his own abstractions made concrete. His reading and his life were characterised by a curious incuriosity.
In Temperance, Young admits to addictive reading of low-calorie lit (Star Trek novels), a diet that results in slack-jawed vacuity. He then (rather undermining his claims to incorrigibly lowbrow taste) brings in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to discuss the ways in which the kind and the amount of reading we do vary as much as our physical appetites. Sometimes we need a palate cleanser; sometimes we crave a bloody steak. Despite the admission of readerly wrongdoing, the reader cannot but intuit a fiercely disciplined approach to the art of reading on Young’s part. His boot-camp severity appealed to my flabby mental muscles; he quietly insisted that I do better as a reader, and I appreciated and responded to the charge.
And yet it is here, in what is otherwise an eminently readable, rousing and hugely intelligent account, that my only cavil lies. Young is so dedicated a reader, so alert to the micrometrics of consciousness when one mind meets another through the medium of the text, that he sometimes passes over the pleasure that results from even the most challenging book. Born rich in the love of his subject, it’s just something he assumes. And yet pleasure — the pure pleasure of the text — is the most persuasive pedagogy we have to offer others, precisely because the joy we take from a great reading experience arrives as a gift as much as a task. Good sex may be physically demanding too, but the resulting gratification cancels out any sense of effort.
This is a small complaint about a large book, however. Large in the sense that it seeks to reorient and recalibrate our reading senses in an age of distraction. Large in its faith that as individuals and citizens, we will embrace the notion that reading well is an obligation: a matter of ethics as much as aesthetics. And large in the sense that its 139 pages hold what Ruskin called a king’s treasure: it contains portals to a thousand other worlds.
Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.
The Art of Reading
By Damon Young
MUP, 139pp, $27.99
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Quoted in Sidelights: “both an adroit and varied exercise, which examines and celebrates the way we read by delivering a public reflection, on an otherwise private art.” Young, he said, “displays an ability to weave between philosophy and literature,” as well as “a genuine curiosity.”
The Art of Reading by Damon Young
Reviewed by Robert Frantzeskos
30 MAR 2016
For many, the task of reading seems simple enough - indeed you have made it this far. What perhaps you didn’t know, is that by exercising an acute way of reading well, you are initiating a delicate and sublime building of worlds. That beneath the intimate and invisible act, there’s a process that ‘is always a transformation of sensation into sense’.
Philosopher and author Damon Young’s The Art of Reading is a journey into precisely this. It is both an adroit and varied exercise, which examines and celebrates the way we read by delivering a public reflection, on an otherwise private art.
Each chapter is marked by a specific literary virtue: curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice, inspired by an Aristotelean notion of virtue where the right path is the mean of the two extremes. This isn’t meant to evoke the rigorous chambers of academic inquiry, on the contrary, each reference to Schopenhauer’s aestheticism or Iris Murdoch’s cloud of daydreams is mediated by descriptions of a Star Trek addiction, or various reinterpretations of Batman – the key in reading is to find the mean between excessive indulgence and temperance.
But the work not only displays an ability to weave between philosophy and literature, we must be curious enough to question everything along the way. It was, perhaps, the excessive pride of the orthodox church and not Kazantzakis’ in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ which caused the worked to be condemned in absentia.
There is a genuine curiosity in Young’s reflections on his own bookish childhood influences. And whilst Young himself occasionally treads on his own literary intoxication, ‘I once binged on Dostoyevsky for the buzz of his sweaty, paling protagonists’, if we adhere to his reading of literary justice, we will give pause for judgement and proclamation. There is profundity here, if one has the necessary virtues – in particular patience, to find it.
Robert Frantzeskos works as a bookseller at Readings St Kilda.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “This literary study is serious but also witty and fun—a tough balance to strike, but Young nails it,”
BEST BOOKSAUTHORSPUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Art of Reading
Damon Young. Scribe, $14.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-947534-02-5
Philosopher Young (Philosophy in the Garden) investigates the act of reading with essays on six virtues he sees exemplified by it—namely curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice—in this brisk and delightful collection. Its short length belies a book heavy with insight, creativity, and wit. To Young’s credit, he treats all types of reading, from scholarly meditation to frivolous binge reading, with seriousness and respect. His literary examples include both highbrow works, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, and beach reads, such as Star Trek novelizations and The Da Vinci Code. The essays vary in their tightness and persuasiveness—some hew quite closely to their featured virtue and give analyses that feel acute and surprising, while others have less well-defined theses—but all uniformly entertain. Young sometimes uses scholarly language (“If curiosity like Borges’s resists the inertia of being, Heidegger’s was a characteristic rejection of stubborn facts altogether”) that requires close attention and even rereading, but his thoughts are lucid and accessible, repaying the reader’s work. Moreover, the closing bibliographic essay will inspire reading lists for months to come. This literary study is serious but also witty and fun—a tough balance to strike, but Young nails it. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 01/08/2018
Release date: 04/24/2018