XVIX. tolle lege

on reading, walking and converting probably

About a week ago I finished reading Brideshead Revisited, a book that came highly recommended by my most trusted literary advisor. From the beginning I thought I knew why he had insisted I read this book for so long: two layabout boys, young and in love the way beautiful, privileged, British boys can be, long spring days, picnics of champagne and strawberries, manor houses, Italy, and the tone of indulgent affection one might have towards a child insisting they were grown while holding their favorite teddy bear. About a fourth of the way in I had dinner with this friend and told him I loved the book. He said, with a little grin, “the funny thing is you aren’t even to the reason why you’ll love it yet.” And as always he was right.

One of my new joys is walking in the park before my Friday opening shift at the bookstore. Daylight struggles during a New York winter; as a devout snoozer I often end up missing the day’s rations. But at 9:00am in Central Park it peeks around the bare limbs of trees and bounces weakly off the water, slowly lighting on morning strollers in a warm, sleepy effort. This past Friday, a friend joined. With coffee and pastries in hand we meandered uptown and talked about grad school and books and not knowing the difference between Continental and Analytic philosophy. We often chat about the nature of academic rigor as it relates to feeling smart—what other people are reading, what we should have read earlier, if it matters, how the “canon” is inescapable—and I admire the way that she, a person I consider to be already extremely intelligent, seriously considers the ways in which she can improve herself through reading. It’s not that she’s trying to cram her brain with facts, or read the classics just to say she has, she reads to change how she is thinking—for her the pleasure seems to lie in the possibility of transformation or, dare I say, conversion.

St. Augustine going through it

For the past six years I have undergone a slow-burn religious conversion via literature. I have written before about how I experience divinity as an embodied experience, but neglected to mention that the catalyst has always been reading. By the third time I came across Confessions, St. Augustine’s dramatic recounting of his own conversion, I had already been flirting with religiosity. Confessions is assigned, at least in part, in almost every Western religion class and by this reading I saw it more as an unavoidable source text for final papers than a persuasive argument for Christianity. I did not expect to be struck by the second half of one of his more famous lines: “‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid you would answer my prayer at once and cure me too soon…” At the time, I was pretty sure I would enter a religious life at some distant point in the future. I wanted to be part of a religion—I envied the faithful, reading as much as I was about the beauty of belief—but I also didn’t want to sacrifice anything, I did not want my life to change in the way I conceived it fundamentally must, I did not want to be “cured too soon.”

Our favorite books are usually favorites because something in them rang true, the feeling of yes that is exactly what that’s like! I’ve been as moved by a description of the smell of a public pool as by a description of pre-adolescent girl friendship. My favorite authors are those who command language to overstimulate the everyday—I know that I have experienced drunken humiliation both because I’ve lived it and because of the way Zadie Smith wrote Zora Belsey stumbling out of a frat party in On Beauty. In this way, reading has become an accidental litmus test for how I’m feeling re: myself, God, etc. Imagine my surprise when, in the final pages of Brideshead as the reason behind the entire narrative was quietly unfurling, I read:

It takes people in different ways…Father Brown said something like, “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

And I thought, well fuck that’s me. And the realization wasn’t anxiety inducing the way other twists on the path have been. At some point I yielded. Somewhere I was caught; now I am wandering, like a fish on a lenient line; the twitch will come and I will be plucked from the waters.

It is almost impossible for me to separate the chicken and egg in these instances, a kind of I read therefore I am vibe. I wonder if I would have the experience without the knowledge; is it a latent certainty lying dormant until sparked? Is it like being surprised by your own reflection—you know you are walking around with your face, but passing by a storefront you might be startled to recognize your own image in full? I had to read this book in this time, when it could impress itself on me with minimal fuss…if anyone else is experiencing an awakening by book let me know. It is ok to be faithful, I think. Maybe that is something we forget. It’s nice to be held.