Tacking; or, a Zigzag Course toward a Point

by Paul Dry

Being a publisher, I find myself moving lots of books in many different ways—I move manuscripts through the editing process; I move finished books from the printer to the warehouse; eventually, I hope, I move those books into the hands of customers. For their part, readers are moved by books that capture their imaginations. One motion is physical and the other metaphysical. Emily Dickinson's famous line "There is no frigate like a Book" suggested sailing—and in particular, the act of tacking—as a way to conceive of these two "motions": a zigzag course toward understanding the reading experience.

Whether it's the recent government report on the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown or a collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry, almost any book transports the reader—to a place real or one completely fabricated. Scroll or codex, newspaper or magazine, paperback or e-book, the reading matter we choose has traveled to us, and vice versa, before it takes us "Lands away."

To accomplish this feat, reading material must be durable. The "publishing history" of the poem Gilgamesh suggests how important durability is. In 1849, three-thousand-year-old tablets of the lost poem came to light in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Had they not endured, readers would be without one of the West's great poems.

Every reader wonders, "What should I read?" Lincoln read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid—lacking abundance, he focused on greatness. But lacking focus and confronted with superfluity, how do we pick the books we read? When I was in the Peace Corps, I asked a friend to send me a list of great novels I should read. Time and inclination worked together to get me through about sixty percent of the fifty titles on the list. Another list (of my own construction), of great books of philosophy, history, and literature, remains only a quarter read.

I don't limit myself to the books on my list, however. (No one is going to tell me what to read, including my better self.) Books come along, new or old, which seem so appealing at the moment that I drop other commitments and take up a new acquaintance. These welcome intruders may enrich my life or depart leaving not a trace.

Why not read books of many kinds and qualities? Since we are beings of moods, we read books to address these different moods. Friends, teachers, reviews, interviews, publicity, advertising, accidental encounters, references in others book, all tell us about books. These sources—from whimsical to authoritative—influence us, persuade us, and guide us.

For many people, including me, computers have made writing easier and published writing more abundant. Will e-books make it easier to distribute writing or make writing easier to read? At some time in the near future, will e-books take pride of place on publishers' lists, leaving the paper-and-ink doppelgangers to shadow their virtual mates.

The physical book gives itself all at once to the reader, while the virtual book displays only a page or two at a time; at the reader's command, pages appear and disappear. Does this difference in presence matter? In the act of reading, my eyes take in the words on the page, and then my imagination fashions images. I link the internal spatial image to the inked words on the physical page in the actual book. I wonder: If you are reading an e-book, does your imagination situate its productions and the virtually printed words in a similar way? Without a physical correlate, does virtual text prompt images that stick in the mind as fixedly as images do with a physical book?

After I've read a book, I put it on the shelf. As an object in space it has a presence that corresponds to its place in my imagination. Thanks to this correspondence, the book and I are better off—the book because I care for it and I because the book has enriched me. The virtual book resides on an electronic reader, biddable if I think to recall it (and if the software has not so changed that it has become lost). To me, however, the e-book is never as present as the physical one—which makes e-books easier to carry but may make their content harder to remember.

Consider the love letter, simple and direct. The Lover writes to the Beloved, folds the pages, encloses them in an envelope, addresses, stamps, seals and mails it. The Beloved receives the letter, reads (and rereads it), basking in the expressions of love and searching for hidden meanings. Author and publisher are one. Reader and critic are one. Writer and reader are bound together.

For published books, the chain is more elaborate: from author to agent to publisher (with the attendant editors, designers, publicists, distributors) to reviewers (and critics) to bookstore, and finally, to reader.

E-books accelerate the delivery from writer to reader, and may abbreviate or even disrupt the sequence, slightly or dramatically. Take these examples:

This chain mirrors the current one for printed books. But, it greatly reduces the time it takes to buy a book. It also eliminates the need for the bricks-and-mortar store.

This chain bypasses the publisher.

(Possibly before long)

Reminiscent of the bond between Lover and Beloved, this chain links the author directly to the reader, with digital technology replacing the postal service. For authors to realize significant sales when they sell directly, they'll have to generate a lot of publicity. Currently, this job belongs predominately to the publisher (with the participation of the author).

If the traditional bookstore doesn't sell e-books, it's out of the chain. Even big bookstores can lose out if they don't get in the e-book game soon enough. Think Borders.

Reading is the most effective means ever produced to realize a nearly infinite number of ends. If you can't read or don't read well, you'll likely have a tougher time reaching the goals you have in mind for yourself.

Reading competency is a good measure of education, and education correlates with better health, higher incomes, and longer life. Given such obviously desirable ends, why do so many remain non-readers or weak readers? Learning to read is arduous, but with time and stick-to-itiveness, a non-reader becomes a competent reader.

Is reading a means to happiness or happiness itself? Here's Virginia Woolf on the subject:

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards . . . the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading."

Reading—surely a means—is, happily, also an end.

Across the land, book-group members regularly gather to discuss books. Spice the book talk with gossip about absent members, offer an assortment of comestibles and spirits, and you have the ingredients for great conversation. Talk about the weather, politics, movies, crime, money, love, passion! Books, as the repository of accounts on these (and all) subjects, are the storehouse and incitement of conversation.

Participants may move from a diffuse sense of the book to a surer grasp of it as a whole, from disagreement with the views of others to agreement—or the opposite, and from being drawn out of oneself to going deeper into oneself. This self-attentiveness, as if you were listening in on and responding to your own over-heard thinking, may be the deepest form of conversation.

At my book-group meetings, I sometimes imagine the book itself as a three dimensional space. Captivated by this notion, I ask myself What's the shape of the story? And sometimes the story speaks back to me. When we were discussing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I saw Ilyich up on the ladder as he awkwardly stretches to arrange the draperies, concerned, as he is, with his guests' high estimation of him. At that instant, the stab of pain he feels is the first symptom of his cancer. So his presence on the ladder stands for his social climbing. Tolstoy converts Ilyich's self-deception regarding his motives into a fatal disease. This image possesses exemplary power.

In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon says (if I've correctly read the demanding sentence from which his famous phrase comes) that the last or furthest end sought in knowledge is "a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."

I assume that for us, as for Bacon, reading gathers knowledge. While most of us agree that knowledge should be for the betterment of our physical well-being, fewer of us, I suspect, believe its storehouse glorifies the Creator. What other reasons, then, beyond material improvement or a wish to "pass the time," can I propose for reading? Amplifying Bacon's intent concerning the end of knowledge as the relief of man's estate, I would say knowledgeable reading also raises my inner estate by making my life richer in significance to me.

In her poem, Emily Dickinson writes of the "Soul," while I've used the word "imagination." I think the two words intend something similar: an inner life. Though we live in the refractory physical world, in the space of our imagination we reshape and review the world in ways otherwise closed to us. At times the productions of my imagination may oppress me; more often they refresh me. They encourage me to return to the world of things, unperturbed by its recalcitrance, and perhaps more able and willing to refashion my world, where possible. Yes, reading is one of the great activities that allow the individual happy traverse between the world and the imagination.