All my life I have had an urge to preserve the extraordinary value of everything that I experience. I think it may be that every human being has this compulsion. It is part of human consciousness – something that has evolved in us beyond plant and animal – to notice and hope to hold forever in memory the unique character of life as it passes in all its infinite variety. If you stop for a moment and think hard about what you see around you, what you experience in all its sudden, fading immediacy, should it even be a crow in a rubbish pit, how extraordinary it must seem.
I read the other day a poem by a good but little known writer, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and in it she wrote some lines which capture what I feel, what I mean. She declares in her poem ‘The Last Class’ that she is driven by
an old compulsion to record,
…to salvage
something from my life, to fix
some truth beyond all change…
Of course, it is frustrating to have this compulsion because it is completely impossible to preserve very much of what happens to us daily, hourly, by the minute. Indeed there is a powerful claim that to the extent that one recalls and records what has happened in life the less you have of life to experience.
I do not believe that. I believe it is when what happens to you life is deeply considered and thoughtfully recorded that life’s full meaning and richness is captured and distilled.
In David Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence a retired linguistics professor, Desmond Bates, is losing his hearing. He is also described as being increasingly deaf to life – until he visits Auschwitz, the old Nazi death camp, whose terrible silence teaches him to hear. He reads a letter from a prisoner in the death camp to the prisoner’s wife which was discovered by a miracle of preservation in a pile of human ashes. A sentence in the letter strikes him: “If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.” That is how we should make ourselves aware: through small falsities, see the great truths of life, do not be unbalanced by the overblown, recognize what is truly valuable in passing time.
And, in valuing the world, an important part of what life has to offer comes through reading. Nobody, in my view, ever lived a full and satisfying life without extensive reading. Reading gives access to dimensions of experience far beyond my own.
It puts me in touch with the achievements and fascination of other lives. It fills my mind with the insights, the revelations, the inspirations of people different, stranger and greater than myself.
There is a passage from the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s book The White Castle about life and about books which is full of truth: “You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach-ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how difficult or complex to understand that book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.”
