A week or so ago, I was talking to a history major and an English major about what we were going to do after we handed in our theses. After we dismissed the obvious first reactions — celebratory champagne, some much-needed sleep — we turned to longer-term plans. One recurring theme, something I often hear in general on campus, was the desire to read books for pleasure. That really stuck with me, so a few days after I handed in my thesis, I headed over to Labyrinth Books in the beautiful sunshine to find something pleasurable to read under a tree. I’ve seen it so often in those college brochures; I figured it was something I should do before I graduate. Little did I know just how tricky this was going to be, this “reading for pleasure.”
The first book I picked up was a new novel. It was by no means a throwaway beach-type novel, but it wasn’t “Ulysses” or anything — just a regular novel. Yet I was having a really hard time reading it. I knew it had been a long time since I had read anything other than works of philosophy or articles on linguistics — and the occasional reading for class — but I wasn’t prepared for how much of a shock this was going to be to my system.
“Why did they just describe a field and then not talk about it again? What page am I on? This sentence doesn’t even have a truth value; what claim is it trying to make? What page am I on? If they’re going to keep using the term ‘Jonathon’ in a way the average reader cannot be familiar with, they should have defined it earlier on. What page am I on? Why is this moving so incredibly slowly? What page am I on?”
It was so hard to slow myself down to really appreciate what was happening in the words, as opposed to trying to get the point of the sentence or paragraph as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was even harder to stop glancing at the page number after every sentence, to not be worried that I had been on this page for a while now and still had nothing intelligent to say about it.
I began to appreciate the true beauty of “reading for pleasure.” It’s reading something and not being expected to come up with brilliant and cogent thoughts about it. It’s about reading and letting the author affect you in ways you cannot so easily put into words. When we read academically, we try, with varying degrees of success, to take what we read and put together pointed, coherent reactions and responses: an important intellectual activity. However, when we read for pleasure, we don’t know why it has the meaning it does, and that’s what matters. I simply don’t have academically interesting thoughts about what reading the last “Harry Potter” book meant to me when I was 16; I just know it had incredible significance.
The reason we want to read books for pleasure, I think, is the same reason I was having a hard time with that novel at Labyrinth — it slows us down. When we were younger, we had time for that sort of thing, but now if it can’t help us craft a comment for precept or add a citation to a paper, we simply have no time for it. Life is a battle to accomplish as much as possible — things that make us think, go or act more slowly are simply roadblocks, obstacles to overcome. Having a long dinner or throwing around a frisbee (another brochure favorite) is fine in moderation because of its utility; it recharges us and allows us to be more efficient later.
How do we fix that? How do we let the love of reading and being affected by books, which was, for many of us, an important foundation for the intellectual curiosity that got us here in the first place, back into our lives? It’s not as simple as saying “read more books for pleasure,” as I found out that day in Labyrinth. Yet after being overwhelmed by the novel, I did come across a book called “A Very Short Introduction to the Old Testament” that acted as a bit of a transition for me from purely academic to purely pleasurable reading; it wasn’t quite the dense philosophy I was used to, but it also wasn’t so fantastical that I could lose myself in it.
In many ways, these next few months will be a transition — from school to beyond, from one state to another, from tests and papers to god-knows-what. But there is nothing saying that preparing to move out into the “real world” can’t include slowing down to fully enjoy the absolutely serene world that is the Mathey courtyard, the sun and a book.
Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.
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