World Book Day – personal reflections

I realise I don’t read for pleasure, just as I don’t often eat for pleasure. It’s a necessity. Yet I find rare pleasure and peace in reading, like running. It’s the place where your mind stills the outside world, then rediscovers it in a place where its parts, even if disordered, can make more sense. 

It’s a place where it’s quiet enough to think again.

I read for meaning. It’s part of a search, a never-ending quest to accumulate and appropriate other people’s insights and experiences and to try and deploy their better knowledge and words in actions that can move people to get off their arses and change the world. My friend says I don’t read for retention, and that’s probably true. Characters’ names, even plots, quickly dissolve as life moves on. 

Yet I do retain. 

I retain the rhythm of the words, the swell of the historical or political currents they encapsulate; their stock of syntax; probably, somewhere in my subconscious, I refine my mind’s analytical tools based on others’ understanding and that helps navigate the world around us. 

Nevertheless, as a writer and a reader I continually doubt myself. Why write when nobody’s reading, at least not internalising? Why read when knowledge and experience – the stuff that gives books their gravitas and societal standing – no longer seem capable of influencing change? 

Have you noticed how many of today’s Zoom warriors choose a bookshelf as their background? “Look at me, I’m erudite,” they (don’t) say. Or is it “look at me, I’m entitled”?

In dark moments, I even fear that writing may be part of the problem. An escape valve for people living with unease, a place to channel angst and anger and evidence – so that it’s literally taken off your chest and placed onto another’s.

I fear the connection between acquiring meaning and the action that should follow has been broken. Has it? Why? 

Why is it that even with the advantage of understanding people seem to remain disabled? People’s lives are penned in (no pun intended, but it’s a good one) by fear, by inertia, by bank loans, by their own “good” life, so that even if they know how bad it is for everybody else they don’t want to disturb.

That’s the psychology of inequality. The grand debilitation. It’s like a nightmare where you need to run but you can’t move. 

Books will be for me a place for time travel, backwards and forwards, a place for self-realisation and discovery. 

After all, Barack, like Bill and Jeff and Elon, is a pop-star philanthropist politician, one of the “winners take all” of a neoliberal economy that has made 95% of the world its losers – much though he may genuinely empathise with black lives and poor lives. And now Barack, in the great tradition of US presidents, is building a memorial library.