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maribouI came across this yesterday in a book about an Australian priest visiting Europe with his mum, and I approved muchly. So, I thought I would put it here (well, also, I'm stalling because I'm afraid that today at work will be a Leak Damage Control day and I hate those).
When I was at university, I studied literature with people who seemed so frightened by what had been entrusted to them that they lived by denial. They said things like 'there is no such thing as a text' and 'the author is dead'. They often used to the metaphor of land or landscape to describe a written work, but treated those works as subject to no prior claim, terra nullius. In the same breath they would lament the injustice by which the first Europeans to settle Australia treated the land as terra nullius. I couldn't figure this out. To me these readers were like theologians who feel the need to deny the existence of God so their subject matter can be kept down to a size they can handle. From them, I gleaned a sense that reading was like visiting an empty house. Books were haunted: they were made of ghostly presences, shades which passed through in their restless wanderings beyond the grave.
I am a different reader from the one I was when I was a kid with my nose stuck in books during the holidays. I don't see reading as a form of escape or flight but as a form of hospitality. I have come to believe that literature is not haunted. It is inhabited. A reader never travels alone. Reading Austen or Hopkins or Wordsworth or the Brontes or Newman is doing more than defraying their postage. It's paying the mortgage on a place for yourself to live, a place from which you can open the door to other travellers.
(From Things You Get for Free, by Michael McGirr.)
When I was at university, I studied literature with people who seemed so frightened by what had been entrusted to them that they lived by denial. They said things like 'there is no such thing as a text' and 'the author is dead'. They often used to the metaphor of land or landscape to describe a written work, but treated those works as subject to no prior claim, terra nullius. In the same breath they would lament the injustice by which the first Europeans to settle Australia treated the land as terra nullius. I couldn't figure this out. To me these readers were like theologians who feel the need to deny the existence of God so their subject matter can be kept down to a size they can handle. From them, I gleaned a sense that reading was like visiting an empty house. Books were haunted: they were made of ghostly presences, shades which passed through in their restless wanderings beyond the grave.
I am a different reader from the one I was when I was a kid with my nose stuck in books during the holidays. I don't see reading as a form of escape or flight but as a form of hospitality. I have come to believe that literature is not haunted. It is inhabited. A reader never travels alone. Reading Austen or Hopkins or Wordsworth or the Brontes or Newman is doing more than defraying their postage. It's paying the mortgage on a place for yourself to live, a place from which you can open the door to other travellers.
(From Things You Get for Free, by Michael McGirr.)
