How to read a book

Abstract

T he idea of a book fair in the city where, a century ago, F’riedrich Nietzsche lost his mind has, in its own turn, a nice ring of madness-a Mijbius ring to be precise (commonly known as a vicious circle), for several stalls in this book fair are occupied by the complete or selected works of this great German. On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author’s existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending. On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors-mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust. Yet even this form of the future is better than the memory of a few surviving relatives or friends on which one cannot rely, and often it is precisely the appetite for this posthumous dimension which sets one’s pen in motion. So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands-those in octave, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc.-we won’t be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with someone’s rustling ashes. In a manner of speaking, libraries @rivate or public) and book stores are cemeteries; so are book fairs. After all, what goes into writing a book-be that a novel, a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, a biography or a thriller-is, ultimately, a man’s only life: good or bad, but always finite. Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger. Nor does one become any younger by reading it. Since that is so, our natural preference should be for good books. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that in literature, as nearly everywhere, “good” is not an autonomous category: it is defined by its distinc-