Yesterday was a day of high literary significance for me! It involved the delivery of a new chair, as pictured. On the wise assumption that reading is enhanced by comfort, context and location, I decided on a chair that fits my current size, shape and literary purposes. It's a small armchair, which fits me and suits me. I deliberately avoided choosing one of those chairs that are so comfortable and spacious, it's easier to fall asleep than to read. This wee beauty fits exactly into the space by the window and the radiator, near the heat and light.
This is a reading chair. No, that's not what it's called or how it's styled. But that will be its purpose; a place to sit and read, think, pray and listen. The study is already that kind of place of course, but there's a difference between reading, studying and consulting books at the desk, and reading and paying attention to one particular book as it is read from start to finish.
For that you need comfort, space, and perhaps the deliberate training of the mind that, when you sit here, in this chair, you are moving into a different mode of learning, thinking and being. Over a lifetime of reading you learn to distinguish between reading that is informative, or formative or transformative; some books are a combination of these.
I'm thinking that at this stage of my life, I could do with a place for unhurried reflection, or imaginative rethinking of ideas that have become too comfortable and familiar. A place too for storytelling and story reading as a way of exploring how I have come to be me. But definitely a place for non-acquisitive enjoyment of what others think, feel and have experienced in their own search for understanding, wisdom and a life worth living.
I've had a reading chair before, of course, and I've often wondered why over the years I slowly became fixed to the desk. I blame the laptop, and the long learned and lived habits of writing on a keyboard to gather, accumulate, organise and harvest the fruits of all that reading! It's more complicated than that, but there's no doubt that information technology, the online world encyclopedia, and the infinite library of knowledge accessed by keyboard, has revolutionised the way we think, learn, and learn to think. Every day I benefit from this revolution like everyone else, and I'm grateful for it and would find life without the online world so much more limited. But it has its limits, this online world of unlimited information.
Which brings me back to books, and a reading chair. A book is such a beautiful concept, and its inbuilt finitude is an essential element of that beauty. For example. A novel creates a world in which the story is told; you read it and much that makes you human is invited, persuaded, even compelled to respond. But a novel has an ending and a resolution. And it is just that capacity to linger in the memory as a continuing lesson in human experience, that makes the novel such a powerful agent of transformation.
Poetry, on the other hand, provokes and encourages an openness to other ways of seeing the world, ourselves, and what matters. But a poem too is finite, and indeed its form and constraint are essential poetic disciplines, requiring the reader to work at it, to feel and think and imagine new ways to the truth of who they are. One of the finest poets understood this deeply, and well: "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of one's self." (Seamus Heaney)
Biography is the narrative of a life, and it matters greatly who writes it. Hagiography and hatchet jobs are the two extremes to be avoided. A well written biography has to be critically appreciative, selectively comprehensive, recount a narrative with impetus but interpreted and illumined by reflection on context, character and an evaluative honesty about the subject's achievement and significance. All of which depends on the integrity, skill, humanity and self-effacing instincts of the biographer.
As a theologian I read theology books, all the way through. Of course I do, you'd think that would be obvious. But I have in mind the kind of theology that unsettles untroubled complacency; writing and thinking about the mystery of God that provokes thought by asking awkward questions we'd prefer to silence; reading therefore theology that expands the dimensions of mind and heart to accommodate new ideas, because God is the new wine that bursts those useful and safe old conceptual wineskins that long ago were new but now need renewed. Not many theological books accomplish that. In my own reading they would perhaps fill a shelf or two if gathered together in one place. Which are they? That may be a post for another time.
A reading chair, then, or at least this one, is for novels, poetry, biographies, theology, and other books intended to be read through, thought about, and allowed to linger in the mind, inform the imagination, and go on doing their work in the heart. So, what will be the first book read in the reading chair? The other day I took down a book I first read 8 years ago. It is more important today than it was then. So the first book will be a re-read: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs, (Oxford: 2011). I'll let you know how I get on.
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