Reading

The other day I was reading a short piece in the London Review about Google Street view, which has just been put up for the UK as of this March. It's written by a journalist who isn't too keen on the idea of having these pictures up online, which is either ironic or entirely reasonable (take your pick) in light of the fact that there are more security cameras in the UK than anywhere else, I think, in the world. It turns out that wearing a hoodie is actually a practical measure if you're trying to avoid having your profile recorded on camera. I had no idea.

Anyhow, the piece begins with a reference to Stendhal: there's a memorable moment in The Red and the Black where Stendhal describes the novel as a mirror being carried down a road:

"Look here, sir, a novel is a mirror moving along a highway. One minute you see it reflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles of the road. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows the mud and you accuse the mirror!"

On Stendhal's account, the man photographed leaving the strip club on Google Street view doesn't have grounds to accuse Google, but this isn't exactly the author's point. I hadn't thought of this passage for six years at least, but it immediately made me remember reading Stendhal in college. I took this one class on nineteenth-century novels, and I was reading, reading, reading all quarter to keep up with it. I'm a remarkably slow reader, especially for a graduate student, and when I had to blaze through Lost Illusions in a week I neglected my other work to get through it. But I really loved those weeks.

Maybe it's something about the French, but I've been thinking about the pleasure of reading more generally of late anyhow because I've embarked on Proust. Proust, for all of his decadence -- it's sumptuous prose, and if you're in the mood for something spartan, it just won't suit -- really understands why we read, and this makes the experience of reading him all the more enjoyable. It's adolescent, I suppose, but how to resist?

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."