Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil Page B
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packed into compartments. For the poet Wordsworth, the job of the poet and the poem is to ‘see into the life of things’.
This cannot be done if we are only separating. Imagination allows us to experience ourselves and our world as something that is relational and interdependent. Everything exists in relation to everything else. The reason that
The Living Mountain
is a ‘good’ book is that it takes a very particular and tiny subject and finds in it, or pulls out of it, a story about how we can understand the world.
The book is a metaphor, yes, but it is also specifically about the Cairngorms. The opening it makes in the mind is its capacity to connect the specific and the local with the universal (and as Robert Macfarlane points out in his lovely introduction, the universal is not the same as the general).
A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book nearly so well. A book lets you follow a writer’s mind. Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does. Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in ‘good’ books that is irrelevant. We don’t remember the books that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it. Memory is talismanic. We hold on to what we need and let the rest go. Just as in our own lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.
Linear time is exhausting. Life has never been more rushed. This present way of being is not a truth about life or a truth about time; it is propositional. We can disagree.
Part of Nan Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the mountain is to stop rushing to the top of the various plateaus of the Cairngorms. At first it is all about the exhilaration of the ascent. How far can she go? How fast? Then she starts circling like a dog with a good nose. She finds that she wants to be in the mountains. ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain, as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’
To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time. I don’t think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime. The total time of a book is more like uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon swim upstream to get home.
We have lost all sense of home – whether it’s the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.
How can a book get me home? It reminds me of where home is – by which I mean I am remapped by the book. My internal geography shifts, my values shift. I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am.
The remapping is sometimes overwhelming – the wow factor of those books that we know have changed our territory – but usually it is much more subtle, and more of a reorienting. I feel settled in myself. To put it another way, I am a settler in myself. I inhabit my own space.
I had a rough childhood. I left home at sixteen and for the next ten years physical home was a provisional space, not permanent, rarely secure. During that time I discovered that books gave me a way of being at home in myself. They provided a shining centre – and if that sounds a bit mystical, I suppose it is, but we all have to find a way of being , a way of living, and as far as I am concerned, life has an inside as well as an outside. Most, if not all, of our time and energy goes into life on the outside – jobs, money, status, getting and spending – and this is disorientating. And it means that if life on the outside is a mess, as it often is, or unsatisfactory, we have no inner
This cannot be done if we are only separating. Imagination allows us to experience ourselves and our world as something that is relational and interdependent. Everything exists in relation to everything else. The reason that
The Living Mountain
is a ‘good’ book is that it takes a very particular and tiny subject and finds in it, or pulls out of it, a story about how we can understand the world.
The book is a metaphor, yes, but it is also specifically about the Cairngorms. The opening it makes in the mind is its capacity to connect the specific and the local with the universal (and as Robert Macfarlane points out in his lovely introduction, the universal is not the same as the general).
A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book nearly so well. A book lets you follow a writer’s mind. Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does. Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in ‘good’ books that is irrelevant. We don’t remember the books that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it. Memory is talismanic. We hold on to what we need and let the rest go. Just as in our own lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.
Linear time is exhausting. Life has never been more rushed. This present way of being is not a truth about life or a truth about time; it is propositional. We can disagree.
Part of Nan Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the mountain is to stop rushing to the top of the various plateaus of the Cairngorms. At first it is all about the exhilaration of the ascent. How far can she go? How fast? Then she starts circling like a dog with a good nose. She finds that she wants to be in the mountains. ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain, as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’
To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time. I don’t think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime. The total time of a book is more like uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon swim upstream to get home.
We have lost all sense of home – whether it’s the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.
How can a book get me home? It reminds me of where home is – by which I mean I am remapped by the book. My internal geography shifts, my values shift. I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am.
The remapping is sometimes overwhelming – the wow factor of those books that we know have changed our territory – but usually it is much more subtle, and more of a reorienting. I feel settled in myself. To put it another way, I am a settler in myself. I inhabit my own space.
I had a rough childhood. I left home at sixteen and for the next ten years physical home was a provisional space, not permanent, rarely secure. During that time I discovered that books gave me a way of being at home in myself. They provided a shining centre – and if that sounds a bit mystical, I suppose it is, but we all have to find a way of being , a way of living, and as far as I am concerned, life has an inside as well as an outside. Most, if not all, of our time and energy goes into life on the outside – jobs, money, status, getting and spending – and this is disorientating. And it means that if life on the outside is a mess, as it often is, or unsatisfactory, we have no inner
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