Introduction to a Special Feature: On the Experience of Reading

All my life I have feared drudgery. When Sharon Dunn first suggested that I edit a section of essays for this issue, my monitors went to red alert. I promptly sought the path of least resistance. I picked a broad topic—reading—and then contacted those writers that I knew, or knew of, who might have something interesting to say and who might be induced to say it for the not-exactly-princely sum that a small journal can afford to pay. I was asking, in short, for a labor of love. And half the people I contacted came through with just that.

What follows is a miscellany, ranging from a short prose poem that Christopher Middleton kindly and spontaneously pencilled into a letter, to a lengthy and abstractly fascinating meditation by Thomas Frick. Stanley Cavell, renowned philosopher and self-confessed “bookaholic,” generously excerpted a section from work-in-progress. Jonathan Galassi found time in his busy editorial day to assemble some notes from the perspective of a professional reader. William Corbett and I fenced with pencils in a neighborhood bar—I was most happy to get his reflections. I credit all of the above with pushing me off in my own direction. I’m not sure whether publishing oneself in one’s own issue is done; but, to put it in the past perfect, it has been. The observant reader will notice, too, a lengthy essay from Seamus Heaney. As a discussion of Irish poetry, it falls outside the parameters intended; as a canny feat of reading, it is the target’s bulls-eye.

It is hardly accidental that so many of the pieces gathered here come in the form of “notes.” Books, as most of these readers would acknowledge, exceed even the material world in diversity. One can no more imagine writing an essay on reading than one can imagine an essay entitled, in all seriousness, “The World.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 1985