重读旧书：基于内疚的快感？_BEC初级作文

重读旧书：基于内疚的快感？

Heart of the matter

It’s true that we often find former selves on the pages of old books (literally, if we’re fond of scribbling in the margins). But even without the aid of marginalia, these texts can carry us back to a time and place, and remind us of the kind of person that we were then.

We’re changed not only by lived experience but also by read experience – by the books that we’ve discovered since last reading the one in our hand.

More so than the movie director or the musician, the writer calls upon our imaginations, using words to bid us picture this declaration of love or that betrayal. It’s not surprising that in my social media poll, of the many and varied titles that people returned to, only one was non-fiction (Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly’s hybrid of literary criticism and memoir). A book is a joint project between writer and reader, and for its alchemy to work, we must pour so much of ourselves into reading that our own life story can become braided with the story that’s bound between the book’s covers.

Perhaps what’s really strange is that we don’t re-read more often. After all, we watch our favourite films again and we wouldn’t think of listening to an album only once. We treasure tatty old paperbacks as objects, yet of all art forms, literature alone is a largely one-time delight. A book, of course, takes up more time, but as Mead and Ellis confirm, the rewards make it amply worthwhile. They needn’t be anointed classics, either. Sabbath’s Theatre by Philip Roth, EL Doctorow’s Ragtime and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch are all on my re-reading list – just as soon as I’ve finished War and Peace, that is.