The Twain

What is reading, exactly? What are you getting so excited about? Isn’t it just a matter of decoding what is encoded? Be reasonable, won’t you?

That is akin to saying that love is just sex. Why are you so busy mapping the terrain and so oblivious to the lark and the softly gossiping grass and the breeze, full of memories? Just look at it! The world.

Are you familiar with the phrase, non sequitur? I asked you a perfectly clear question about the infant in your enormous family of strange, impulsive obsessions, i.e., reading, and you start yammering about birds and air filled with the contents of minds. You’re lost. How’s the view?

Hold on. Did you just deploy a carefully crafted metaphor, Mr. Concision and Accuracy? Influence. All of the symptoms point to the same diagnosis. I am having an influence on you. It is a sacred bond, that which unites teacher and pupil, master and disciple, Ice-T and Alayah High, Homer and the Coen brothers, together swirled—

Enough! I was bound to absorb some of your vile habits eventually. Who else do I have to talk to in this mad world? Look, I understand the usefulness of reading as a means of acquiring information; I’m just not sure I understand what’s so interesting about the process. Isn't it obvious to you?

You enjoy fine grained distinctions. Is reading something one either can do or cannot do, or can it be done well or poorly, with style and panache or a sort of ugly, plodding resignation? Is reading akin to swimming or archery or poaching an egg, or is it like flying? Not learning to use a device to fly, mind you: just deciding to do so yourself, when your wings, by the right mood, are unfurled.

I suppose the efficiency of the process could improve or decline. But it must be something that certain minds can do and others cannot. No amount of training could possibly allow fungi or plankton to read. It must be something one can or cannot do. How is that helpful to review?

You are mistaking the star for the galaxy again. Such a precise drill, with so many openings already available. Look, the dichotomy is probably false at any rate. One could suddenly acquire the ability to do something one was incapable of doing before, and then get better at doing it. My point is, the better you do it, the more you discover about how it could be done brilliantly. You keep at it. You test yourself against those with a sparkling reputation for their virtuosity, ancient or contemporary. You aspire to excellence, knowing that it grows more remote as one advances, by ambition hurled.

Your prey will succumb to exhaustion and collapse eventually, allowing you to close the distance and end the hunt. At any rate, I still have no idea what you are talking about, nor why you can’t simply say what you mean in simple terms. Simplicity is not a mark of stupidity or clumsiness. You can be such a pretentious twit. Control yourself, won’t you?

Hunter, hunter, losing sight

Of the tree mid forest’s night

What is that, some sort of “poem” you cooked up for lack of an intelligible response to my question? Is it based on a cliche?!? Dispense with the rhymes, please! Suppose I affirm your premise, purely for the sake of argument. I will take it as read that reading (if you say anything about puns at this point, this conversation is over. Food is shaking your grip on my attention with increasing strength) is something that can be done well or poorly, once a mind acquires the ability to do it at all. I’m still not sure why that is important, or even mildly interesting. Do you have any idea how long it has been since we had anything to eat? Some sadist is at work. I’m hungry.

When did you stop thinking about numbers and start thinking about mathematics? I certainly can't remember doing so myself. At some point, the whole reveals itself as different from, and larger than, the parts. To be perilously candid given your worship of them, numbers leave me cold unless I am fanatically rooting for one competitor against another. Then they acquire a nimbus of dramatic significance. One can do this while watching the hands (or luminous digits) of a clock. Ask anyone who, unlike certain parties, has ever had a boring, meaningless job and no way to escape from it save through life's iron gates.

I really am not sure how you can stand yourself, sometimes. That was unnecessarily unpleasant. I do apologize for that breach of polite protocol. I really am famished, you know? It's making me irascible and impulsive. I simply cannot understand what is taking so long. We mastered finding food long ago. Granted, it is not always especially fine dining, but that sort of thing is really beside the point.

Which is where all of the fascinating things live. Do you have any idea how qualitatively distinct buying badly made gruel and producing an exquisite (improvised!) glaze for a salmon fillet are? My point, though I vehemently dislike that metaphor (that one earlier, about the infant and the family, that was deft. Nice work. I do have a jungle of obsessions, don't I? You just ache to prune that riotous foliage, don't you? Control!), is that reading is not merely decoding. It is a matter of creating earth and trees and pain and ecstasy and music and salty kisses and indeed, a whole riotous froth of worlds in the private theater of your own imagination. It is a wardrobe of selves to inhabit and smell and create and die in.

You have to seek some kind of help, you know. And a sandwich. Two birds.

So patronizing, from your lofty perch atop all of that icy data. You do not simply ingest the text a piece at a time. You turn the map into the lush, enigmatic terrain, and if the map is artfully made, it is less a map than a ticket.

What sort of warped world are you living in? Are you trying to tell me that reading is not just a means of information retrieval, but some sort of expedition? I cannot recall leaving the chair and making my way to Camelot or Hogwarts or those damnably overwrought moors where you swooned over Heathcliff, who is also in need of a psychiatrist and a proper lunch.

I sympathize. You are just trying to measure the volume of the tub instead of dreaming in the suds. Don't the jigsaw pieces bore you? Instead of counting them, why don't you see what they combine to form?

That's it. It's either eat a foot or find something less awful to eat. We'll take this up later when there is surplus blood sugar to be squandered. Fancy twit.